Word: pram
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...asked her, predictably, about Women's Lib. "On the whole, I am with it," said Dame Rebecca. Nothing else that she said was in any way predictable. On women writers: "They seem hopelessly defeated by their domesticity. When I turn their pages, I see not just a pram in the hall but a whole house filled with prams, prams sideways up the stairs, prams in the back garden." On women at work: "The population is divided into people who like work and do it and people who hate work and don't do it-they are as distinct...
...book is a comic novel with decent depth to it and not an upturned raincoat collar in sight. Its faults are obvious though not crippling. There are bright but purposeless pages. Le Carre takes far too long to find his narrative's focus. His hero, a rich pram manufacturer who discovers Life, sometimes wambles about in the state of blithering idiocy invented by Evelyn Waugh to let the air out of the upper middle class and reproduced more easily and less funnily since then by each successive Englishman to write a light novel...
Aldo Cassidy, the pram king, is 36 years old and nice, but numb. His wife, whose frigidity extends beyond sex, calls him by nursery names. One day he meets Shamus, a wild writer and roaring boy, and Helen, Shamus' fine, warm wife. He falls in love quite innocently with the pair of them. "Gradually, with the aid of a third bottle of wine and several names supplied by Shamus," le Carre writes, "Cassidy formed a picture of this wonderful band of brothers, this few: a non-flying Battle of Britain squadron captained by Keats and supported by Byron, Pushkin...
...quit the Times and devoted his life to writing. The facts of his life aren't as important, of course, as the way Greene remembers or reacts to them, and the way the young Greene responded to them. For example: 'The first thing I remember is sitting in a pram at the top of a hill with a dead dog lying at my feet." This is the kind of thing Greene remembers and chooses to relate. The very matter-of-factness of its horror changes a dull life into one full of terror and hidden meaning...
Russian Roulette. "The first thing I remember," Greene begins, "is sitting in a pram at the top of a hill with a dead dog lying at my feet." He soon progresses from such minishocks to a brief near-caricature of the English literary boyhood-that beautiful, remote mother, for instance, not to mention the wretched loneliness and the usual hatred of the cruel school. In Greene's case, the problem was quadrupled because his Church of England father was headmaster of the Berkhamsted School, where Greene went, and that, he recalls, made him feel like a perpetual "Quisling...