Word: basil
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...occasional lapses in horsewomanship. At a charity fund-raising evening sponsored by the Grand Order of Water Rats, an entertainers' organization, Anne and Husband Captain Mark Phillips arrived to accept a check on behalf of the Police Dependents Trust. "Have you fallen off any good horses lately?" cracked Basil Brush, a puppet fox and star of a children's tele vision show. Replied Anne coolly: "You don't fall off good horses...
Enter the villain, Basil Yanko, a Yankee basilisk whose mysterious firm, Creative Systems, runs Harlequin's computer operations. He makes two announcements to Paul Desmond, Harlequin's loyal aide: 1) he is prepared to buy out Harlequin, for a suspiciously high figure, and 2) computer print-outs show that Harlequin himself has embezzled $15 million from his own company. It is clear, of course, that Yanko and his minions (this is the sort of novel in which the villain has minions) have framed Harlequin. But can this be proved to the international banking community? And what about Yanko...
What plot the novel has concerns the arrival of those two children-now the famous actor Sir Basil Hunter and the Princesse Dorothy de Lascabanes of Passy-to try to dismantle their mother's property, pen her up in a nursing home, thus reducing her expenses and increasing their inheritance. It is not an original scheme for a long novel, but then White has never been put off by unpromising material. He has also been accused of not liking his characters, and the criticism seems apt regarding the Hunter family and their satellites...
...Basil is afraid of his fame and is a near-alcoholic. Dorothy's French prince tired of her years ago. They are both acute, sensitive people, and as heartless as attack dogs. In Madame de Lascabanes, White seems to delight in lavishing attention on someone he truly loathes. She is shy, awkward and fastidious. There is a set-piece scene in which she eats lunch alone at an exclusive women's club and hears each lady chewing her food at nearby tables...
Died. Viscount Brookeborough, 85, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from 1943 to 1963 and a staunch adversary of the Irish Republican Army; in Colebrook, Northern Ireland. Sir Basil Brooke until his elevation to the peerage in 1952, his refusal to bring the Roman Catholic minority into Northern Ireland's public affairs left his country with a legacy of strife that overshadows his positive achievements...