"Your father was an Arabist, I recall?"
"Yes," said Guillam, his mind yet again on Molly, wondering whether dinner was still possible.
"And frightfully Almanach de Gotha. Now was he an A.D. man or a B.C. man?"
About to give a thoroughly obscene reply, Guillam realised just in time that Martindale was enquiring after nothing more harmful than his father's scholarly preferences.
"Oh B.C. B.C. all the way," he said. "He'd have gone back to Eden if he could have done."
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, October 14, 2010
An A.D. Man or a B.C. Man?
John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy (1977; rpt. New York: Pocket Books, 2000), p. 206: