Word: british
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...horribly disfigured from the motorcycle crash, he's in Nashville, no I mean Jerusalem, did you know he sends his kids to the Putney School? And did you know there's a Bob Dylan movie coming out, something better than Don't Look Back, the film of the '65 British tour he withdrew from circulation? Rumors all, kid--don't believe a word of it--and get away from me, you bother...
...latest novel, The Human Factor, doesn't even have the long-lost piety to hang on to. He still sneaks into an occasional church (he's an ex-Protestant, not Catholic), and tries to summon up guilt and contrition, but somehow nothing happens. What Maurice Castle, middle-echelon British intelligence officer, near retirement age and with jurisdiction over Africa, lives for is security and peace of mind. All Castle really treasures is his routine, his two double whiskies before dinner, his comfortable house in the town outside London where he grew up, and his family. This attachment to the brood...
...bent on saving the Vietnamese for Democracy--by strategically wiping them out--and took as his bible the cold-warring treatises of an Ivy League academic named York Harding (Walt Rostow? Probably; it was too early for Sam Huntington.) Next to Pyle, the weary aloofness of the British journalist, Fowler, seemed almost noble. And next to what we know came of all that idealistic American sabre-rattling, Fowler's final decision to help the Viet Minh murder Pyle appears nothing less than heroic...
...sacred private life on the line. Suspecting a leak but collaring the wrong man, his superiors in the BSS have prematurely liquidated the man who shares Castle's office, a lonely but likeable fellow named Darvis. "C," the chief of operations, has also asked Castle unadvisably to be the British liaison in a fanciful (or perhaps not so fanciful) project code-named "Uncle Remus," in which the U.S., Britain and West Germany are helping the white South African minority to retain political power with tactical nuclear weapons. To add injury to insult, Castle learns that the man who helped...
...Castle's decision tugs at our sympathy, and several reviewers have speculated that Greene means through this novel to justify in a roundabout way the defection in the '60s of his good friend, Kim Philby. But if we take Castle's side, it is largely because the British superiors he defies in the book come off as such cardboard villains. "Uncle Remus," conceivable even now, is done here too baldly to be believed. It is also a bit much that the heads of British intelligence meet over lunch and after shooting parties, to discuss plans for liquidation and trout fishing...