The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Vintage Books 1968)

"How I loathe that bastard," Gunvald Larsson muttered suddenly.

"What?"

"I'll tell you something I've never said to anyone else," Gunvald Larsson confided. "I feel sorry for nearly everyone we meet in this job. They're just a lot of scum who wish they'd never been born. It's not their fault that everything goes to hell and they don't understand why. It's types like this one who wreck their lives. Smug swine who think only of their money and their houses and their families and their so-called status. Who think they can order others about merely because they happen to be better off. There are thousands of such people and most of them are not so stupid that they strangle Portuguese whores. And that's why we never get at them. We only see their victims. This guy's an exception."

"Hm, maybe you're right," Rönn said.

Orwell Remembered by Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick

A bit of a departure from the usual business of cutting and pasting a paragraph to give you a flavour of the book just read.

As it's Orwell, and as it's a book given over to reminiscences, I've decided to cut and paste three passages which give you both a sense of the book and of the man . . . and of where I'm coming from now that I come to think about it.

And that was typical of him. I remember his comment when I told him of an experience of mine in the early 1920s. In those days the Communist Party enjoyed very little prestige in England and was still affiliated to the Labour Party. One day I was at a Labour Club in north London and someone said: 'You must meet our Communist poet.' I was then introduced to a dishevelled looking man whose name, to my astonishment, I recognised as that of a distinguished member of the Symbolist group. When I told Orwell about this many years later he said: 'Ah, but in those days, you see, it didn't pay to be a Communist; and it's a pretty safe rule to say about anything that as long as it doesn't pay it's all right.' Justice, in other words, is always with the weaker side because it does not pay to join it. But he certainly sometimes carried the principle to absurd lengths, and this aspect of him was wittily described by Mr V. S. Pritchett in an account of how Orwell once advised him that he ought to keep goats. The chief point being, so Mr Pritchett gathered, that it would put him to a lot of trouble and he would be certain to lose a lot of money; and Orwell got quite carried away with enthusiasm as he expounded the 'alluring disadvantages' of the scheme.

(Sir Richard Rees, pages 120-121)

Let this point be made clear: Orwell did cope with the baby. It may have been romanticism, but, if so, it was romanticism that found practical expression. This was characteristic of him in all he did. His idiosyncrasies were based in guts.

He would still go out at night to address protest meetings - 'probably a blackguard, but it was unjust to lock him up' - and the baby would be left to sleep for an hour or two at our house while Orwell was haranguing his audience.

'What was the meeting like?' one would ask on his return.

'Oh, the usual people.'

'Always the same?'

'There must be about two hundred of them altogether. They go round to everything of this sort. About forty or fifty turned up tonight, which is quite good.'

This down-to-earth scepticism, seasoned with a dash of self-dramatisation, supplied a contradictory element in Orwell's character. With all his honesty and ability to face disagreeable facts, there was always about him, too, the air of acting a part . . .

(Anthony Powell, page 245)

While he was attacking the bullies on the right he nearly starved to death. Once he turned to the bullies on the left, the right having been temporarily beaten, he made his fortune. This was due to no lack of integrity on his part. For he never fell for Communism for a moment although he was more deeply concerned with social justice than most men, and more unselfishly so than some. It had cost him plenty in the thirties and on the left to be so uncompromisingly anti-Communist, yet he liked reading Trotsky and even more reading Rosa Luxemburg. For all his masculineness the fact that it was a woman who had such a good mind, a better one than Lenin's, did attract him.

As for the British anarchists and near-anarchists, vegetarians and sex reformers, he found them the most disappointing of all. As they never had the slightest chance of getting into power anyway he thought that they might as well have stuck to their principles, whereas all they seemed to do was get bogged down in the mess of their doctrines. About their principles, they chopped and changed, like a Christian Brother on a debating platform with a lot of non-conformists. He loved Bartolomeo Vanzetti, however, as much as I do; whose hands were smelly with the smell of the fish he peddled, but to whom all the poor of the whole world were what Beatrice was to that great Florentine, his countryman. Because of him, Piedmont can stand unashamed in front of Tuscany. At the trial of the anarchists during the war, the British judge, Sir Norman Birkett, as he then was, behaved better in his role than did the prisoners in the dock in theirs, which of course was a better role.

(Paul Potts, pages 253-254)

Hazell and the Three-Card Trick by P.B Yuill (Penguin Books 1975)

The pub Minty chose was rough even by Hammersmith standards. Of course there's good parts and bad parts of Hammersmith. This pub was as bad as any going.

Minty was already at the slopping bar when I pushed through the dingy saloon door.

It wasn't rough meaning violent - just horrible. The paper was coming off the walls in damp patches and the decor was like an old railway waiting-room with one difference. The lighting. I've never been in such a brightly-lit boozer. It was glaring.

The staff was an Irish bloke about twenty-five. He had the beer gut of a much older man. It was straining against a grey vest that in its turn was trying to pop out where his shirt buttons were missing.

From his pained movements and sharp sighs and groans it was possible he was suffering the worst hangover since Pisa. He hadn't shaved that day, although that was hardly likely to upset the clientele.,/p>

Actually I feel sorry for the Irish who come over here to wear big letters on their backs. They generally leave the wife at home on holy soil and only see her at Xmas to father next year's crop. In between Xmases they doss down in cheap rooms and send the wife's money home by postal order and drink themselves silly to fill up the void.

Thumping each other and kicking Chinese waiters is about the height of their swinging lives. They don't seem to have much interest in the local women and they tend to stick to their own pubs. 'It's gone Irish,' you'll hear people say about a rub-a-dub that's been taken over by the big men with the pixie ears. It's not meant as a recommendation.

I say sorry but not enough to want ten of them home for a cooked meal.

Hazell Plays Solomon by P. B. Yuill (Penguin Books 1974)

Back at Claridges they tried Mrs Gunning's suite again. No joy. I sat in the lounge and read the Standard. A loud cross-section of rich America trailed back and forth from the door to the desk.

I crossed my legs a lot. Nothing much was happening in the papers, a wages gang had got away with £89,000 in Pinner, London's new Labour bosses were planning radical moves but not now, an old widow had been raped and strangled in Camden Town, David Frost had a new girl, Battersea basements had been flooded by a cloudburst, new revelations were rocking the White House, the London football managers were again guaranteeing brighter soccer to bring back the missing millions, Centre Point was still empty, a teenager had been stabbed to death on his own doorstep, more old buildings were to come down to make way for more empty office blocks, London airport customs had pounced on cannabis worth £800,000 while London airport police were looking for a stolen consignment of diamonds worth £300,000. Oh yes, and our trade figures were the best for ten years. Or the worst, I can't remember.

Seeing it was dry again I went out and had a stroll round the interior of Mayfair. Wealthy middle-aged people brayed to each other in the entrances to restaurants that didn't have price menus outside. There's class for you. Uniformed chauffeurs relaxed with cigarettes in their masters' Rolls-Royces. A covey of bright young things in society gear whinnied on a balcony.

I knew they couldn't be real society. I mean, nobody hangs around dreary London in August, Jeremy. They didn't even chuck plovers' eggs at me.