Word: fitzgibbons
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This jolly-sounding novel, which draws its title from Robert Browning's account of the last days of the Venetian Republic, might more properly be called FitzGibbon's Decline and Fall of the British Empire. With horrid persuasiveness, it looks forward to the moment, somewhere between 1960 and 1984, when Britain decides "to commit suicide" and becomes a Soviet satellite. Lest any reader think he is not reading about the possible, FitzGibbon provides a text from Lenin, who held that in war, it is best to wait "until the moral disintegration of the enemy renders the mortal blow...
Skillfully skirting the borders of fee-fi-fo-flummery, FitzGibbon evokes both moral disintegration and mortal blow with a chilling casualness that sometimes has the ring of day-after-tomorrow's newspaper. To achieve his grisly effect, he painstakingly puts together a mosaic of slight things that seem to have gone wrong in the commonplace of today-the "crack in the teacup [that] opens a lane to the land of the dead...
...there is nothing fatal or final to point to. In Britain, the Tories still hold the husk of the Establishment and hope in the upcoming elections to make it "Four in a Row." The new element is the familiar Anti-Nuclear Bomb movement of today, but in FitzGibbon's time its pony-tailed and sandaled youth has swollen into the biggest political fact in Britain, led by zealots and exploited by those who know that pacifism cannot help but help the Russians. And when, in a landslide-election win, the anti-Bomb boys and girls take power...
COMMANDANT OF AUSCHWITZ (285 pp.) -Rudolf Hoess, translated by Constantine Fitzgibbon-World...
...been true with other alumni meetings in the Houses, visitors were most impressed by the undergraduate panel, and particularly by Harry Fitzgibbon '58, who met his House Master for the first time yesterday morning and praised the House system because "it lets me alone...