Word: palfrey
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...spent the past 20 years of his career papering over the questionable deeds of the secret service, mopping up after the people he calls espiocrats. "I am quickly dealt with," he writes of himself. "You need not stumble on me long." To the contrary. He, "old Harry" or "old Palfrey" to his colleagues, is the one who shapes this story, colors it with his own disillusionments, invites credibility through his own refusal to believe in much of anything at all. And, early on, he drops a crucial hint about what is to come, portraying himself in his nondescript office "while...
This touch alone reveals the reason why Le Carre makes all his alleged competitors -- the Ludlums, the Clancys, the Trevanians, even the Deightons -- look like knuckle-typers. Palfrey is describing a failure, an intricate scheme that collapses somewhere along the tortuous road plotted for its success. The world will not be saved, love will not triumph, and tomorrow will dawn with the same grimy sense of indeterminate morals and motives as yesterday. This much is certain. What remains to be discovered is the marvelously engrossing way in which everything can go wrong...
...Great Hall already contains a number of busts and at least one memorial (to John Gorman Palfrey) which are not relevant to the Union forces. The condition is, indeed, laid down in the deed of gift by which the Alumni Association transferred Memorial Hall to the Harvard Corporation in 1878 that no memorial should be put into it inconsistent with its purpose of commemorating not only the Union dead but all Harvard men who served in the Union forces. But it does seem that after the lapse of more than a century, this condition might be waived, either...
...state board voted in September to include all the buildings on the register, but immediately agreed to reconsider one of the Harvard-owned buildings--Palfrey Hall on Oxford St.--and many of the MIT Properties, Weslowski said. Harvard did not send a representative to the September meeting, she added
...book's first scene is in some ways its best: Philippa Palfrey, 18, a privileged girl, adopted, visits a social worker to start the legal process of learning the identity of her natural parents. Philippa is beautiful and cold; long ago she guessed that the Palfreys had selected her, when she was eight, because of her grave intelligence and unusual looks. For her and the reader the cruel blow comes early: her real parents turn out to be murderers of the most melodramatic sort. For the rest of the story James must crawl back from a cliché that...