Word: schoolboys
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Probably one of the first spy-novel fans to become intrigued with John le Carré's new bestseller, The Honourable Schoolboy, was TIME Hong Kong Correspondent Bing Wong. In fact, he got involved with the book and author that are the subjects of this week's cover story well before Le Carré-David Cornwell, that is-began to write his tale of British intelligence and Far Eastern intrigue. Wong and Cornwell met in the summer of 1975 in Hong Kong. As Wong recounts, Cornwell "picked my brain" for background detail. Last October, when Cornwell returned...
...British fortunes reached their nadir in 1936. The British squad that year included teenage champion John Langley and another schoolboy star named P.B. "Laddie" Lucas, who was perhaps the handsomest lefthander ever to play the game and in later life a Member of Parliament. Despite this typical effort to inject new blood into its corps of golfing ambassadors, the British were shutout that year at Pine Valley in New Jersey by a score...
...perceptions. If his book is an appropriate souvenir rather than an imposing artifact, it is perhaps because the author no longer shares those beliefs and urgencies that once dramatized the expatriate novel. Theroux would probably agree with a character in John le Carre's forthcoming thriller The Honourable Schoolboy-a literary agent who observes that "nobody's brought off the Eastern novel recently, my view. Greene managed it, if you can take Greene, which I can't - too much popery. Malraux, if you like philosophy, which I don't. Maugham you can have, and before that...
...share of temper tantrums-and racquets-along the way. Still, compared with Nastase's death threat against a New York Times reporter and Connors' deliberate snub of the parade of past champions, McEnroe's behavior was no more reprehensible than that of a high-spirited schoolboy-which he is. McEnroe's remarkable odyssey came to an end in his semifinal match with Connors. Betrayed by his serve-always the last phase of a youngster's game to come under control -McEnroe succumbed in four sets...
Tomfoolery is a schoolboy's idea of manic anarchy; he cannot destroy the foundations of dominance without destroying himself, so he resorts to the mockery of mimicry. What he doesn't realize is that his mimicry deprives him of identity (just as the best parody is only barely distinguishable from its victim), and he, the mocking schoolboy, becomes the personification of his school. Similarly, denatured anarchy can exist in the King's Court, the eunuch in the harem, and the Harlequin can blend into the royal robes. Christ, the ultimate fool in his renunciation of worldly existence, can exist...