Word: clive
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...figure who has paid too heavily, in inner hardness and human loss, for the world's prizes. Even between him and the daughter he loves there is a gulf, now widened by her engagement to another such aging man of distinction as himself. Numb and parched, Josiah Bolton (Clive Brook) casts about for an unobtrusive way to die. But in time his daughter (Margaret Phillips) makes him feel her need...
...assistant a man he has never seen before, Geologist Ivre MacGregor, an uncommunicative Scot who grew up in Iran. It is a choice that plagues and defeats him. Mac not only sympathizes with the revolution and gives the Russians a bill of health; he also cops sophisticated Kathy Clive from under the very nose of Essex, who had her all earmarked for himself. At the end, Mac's hope for civil war in Iran is somewhat dashed, but he has just to fight and Kathy...
...were interchangeable stage props, Lord Essex, half Blimpish charlatan, half rhesterfieldian dandy, is too close to caricature to convince even a reader of Pravda. MacGregor is too churlish, too slow-witted to be anyone's hero, let alone that of a sharp gal-of-all-embassies like Kathy Clive. Whatever a reader's politics, he may well be puzzled by the publisher's announcement that they consider the novel "the most important book about the most important man [the diplomat] in the world today...