Word: secretly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Under interrogation, quite a few members of John le Carre's vast and devoted reading public might confess a gnawing secret: the wish that the author would get on with his stories a bit more speedily than he has been doing for the past 15 or so years. Ever since Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), in this view, Le Carre has been unduly shifting emphasis from action to atmospherics; his espionage plots remained splendidly inventive, but they arrived splintered into ambiguities worthy of Henry James. Which was fine, maybe, for those who wanted their cold war shenanigans decked...
...irresponsibility: heavy drinking, an accumulation of debts, ex-wives and mistresses. But Barley is not the only odd man out. Witnessing and narrating these events is Horatio Benedict dePalfrey, a lawyer who has 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...
...Zhao's remarks to the students finally precipitated his fall, they were apparently not the only reason. In his talk with Gorbachev, telecast live to millions of Chinese on Tuesday, Zhao told of a secret party agreement specifying that Deng, though semiretired, was responsible for major party decisions. The document, crafted in 1987, was a compromise that paved the way for the retirement of a clutch of old party conservatives. That disclosure got Zhao in trouble less because it was made to the representative of an old enemy nation than because it signaled to the viewing audience that resentment...
When Michael and I were set free, we both had a hard time not laughing at the incident. Should we have been upset? Or was it just too silly for us to get upset? It was the secret between the two of us that made each of us grin, even laugh, when we looked at one another that night...
Fourteen productive years and thousands of dusty miles later, My Secret History does that and more. Theroux, 48, reinvents not only his great train odyssey but other chapters of his exotic autobiography as well. The result is the most consistently entertaining of the author's more than two dozen books, a serial portrait of the artist as a young stud that will undoubtedly cause the usual confusion about what is fact and what is fiction...