Word: whiskeys
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Reading this collection of essays and sketches is a bit like listening to a bristly British clubman, over whiskey-and-sodas, who has been cursed with total recall. Kingsley Amis was the archetypal Angry Young Man, as well as a very funny one, when he wrote Lucky Jim back in 1954. Amis can still be funny, when in the mood, but he is also still out of sorts: Memoirs seems to have been compiled as much to settle old scores as to relive the past...
...startling conclusion: it doesn't. Yet O'Rourke, an unabashed conservative with libertarian leanings, tells you why government is a flop in a way no civics textbook ever could. "I'm not sure I learned anything," he writes, "except that giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys...
...greatest fiction spanned the years 1938 to '51: Brighton Rock (1938), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The End of the Affair (1951) and, most hauntingly, The Power and the Glory (1940). The pilgrimage of the nameless "whiskey priest," on the run in a Mexican state from a sectarian tyranny, remains a thrilling adventure of despair and irrational redemption...
...Drank a good deal of whiskey, trying to relax," he begins, and that prescription is followed through the 1940s and '50s. Occasional grace notes occur, but hangovers and revulsion are usually the order of the day: "I feel sick, disgusted with myself, despairing and obscene. I have a drink to pull myself together at half past eleven and begin my serious drinking at half past four." And: "Evening comes or even noon and some combination of nervous tensions obscures my memories of what whiskey costs me in the way of physical and intellectual well-being. I could very easily destroy...
...change the atmosphere," she said. "We'll go to the library and forget about business." It seemed to me that Mrs. Thatcher was pleased that I followed her example and preferred whiskey...