Word: servant
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...racial injustice, the development of Colombia, and equality between rich and poor as social ideals that would melt his flinty eyes. "Learning to struggle for unobtainable things, without being cynical, that kind of frame of mind is associated with working in the public concern," he says. Fisher the civil servant is satisfied after work when he has "changed the chance of something getting done from a chance of .02346 to a chance...
There is something irreligious in all this emphasis on Marshfield as author, and something dangerously athilistic. Marshfield takes his creator image too seriously for a humble servant of God--his apostasy is in his arrogance, more than his adultery. But Marshfield is sincerely religious, and this novel lives on the tension between his doubt and his belief, between his fear of "the universal nullity...
Pepys kicked his cook and sold a black servant into slavery to finance his already ample stores of chocolate and sherry. Once, while in bed, he blacked an eye of the wife he married when she was 15. More regularly, he pulled her nose and terrorized her about kitchen expenses. Against his enemies, or his imagined enemies, he was capable, in Ollard's words, of "scurrility verging at times on the hysterical." Yet Ollard feels compelled to insist that here, dear reader, stands a "kindhearted...
...book is a chronicle of botched hopes and personal failures. The government sinks in corruption and ineptitude. Idealistic university students stumble over their ignorance and lack of discipline. A servant girl's brief moment of romance leads to jungle rot and death in childbirth. Cynical political hacks are failed Communists and newspapermen are often failed poets who have difficulty with the fundamentals of news writing. "You have to start with the dead people, young man," advises one helpful editor. The novel's title does not refer to the church, which the author oddly does not deal with...
...look first after that public's narrower interests. The first bleak lesson a young idealist in politics learns is that his idealism may give him an attractive freshness, but his durability in office will be decided on more practical grounds: by a public looking for a public servant. Thus Gerald Ford probably did not think of himself as cynical but as merely plying his trade when he cautioned reporters not to judge how he would act in the White House on the basis of how he had voted in Congress. "Forget the voting record," he said. "The voting record...