I have read Baroness James' new novel, "The Private Patient." Thanks to my son Bart for giving it to me for Christmas!
Here is a wonderful quote. P.D. James is a great observer of her civilization, or what is left of it. This is a description of a character's thoughts about her family:
"But this is where I came from, these are my people, the upper working class merging into the middle class, that amorphous, unregarded group who fought the country's wars, paid their taxes, clung to what remained of their traditions. They had lived to see their simple patriotism derided, their morality despised, their savings devalued. They caused no trouble. Millions of pounds of public money wasn't regularly siphoned into their neighborhoods in the hope of bribing, cajoling or coercing them into civic virtue. If they protested that their cities had become alien, their children taught in overcrowded schools where 90 per cent of the children spoke no English, they were lectured about the cardinal sin of racism by those more expensively and comfortably circumstanced. Unprotected by accountants, they were the milch-cows of the rapacious Revenue. No lucrative industry of social concern and psychological analysis had grown up to analyse and condone their inadequacies on the grounds of deprivation or poverty. Perhaps she should write about them before she finally relinquished journalism, but she knew that, with more interesting and lucrative challenges ahead, she never would."
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