Word: clubman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Thirty years ago, at the opening of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, the protagonist, Leamas, was defined as a person who could not quite pass for a London clubman, a "man who was not quite a gentleman." Now, early in his new book, we are told that John le Carre's latest alienated loner, Jonathan Pine, though taken for a gentleman, did not in fact go to "that kind of school." A pungent reminder that the real wars Le Carre has been chronicling -- the class war in Britain, and the civil (very civil) war between one side...
Reading this collection of essays and sketches is a bit like listening to a bristly British clubman, over whiskey-and-sodas, who has been cursed with total recall. Kingsley Amis was the archetypal Angry Young Man, as well as a very funny one, when he wrote Lucky Jim back in 1954. Amis can still be funny, when in the mood, but he is also still out of sorts: Memoirs seems to have been compiled as much to settle old scores as to relive the past...