Saturday 8 May 2010

holding out for a hero

I'm reading The Saint Bids Diamonds, enjoying the house-style/period hyperbole.
He realised that if her mouth had been happy it would have been very happy, a soft, red, full-lipped mouth that would have tantalised the imagination of any man whose impulses were human.

Possibly he was quite mad. If so, he always had been, and it was too late in life to worry about it. But it was his creed that adventure waited for no time-tables, and everything he had ever done or would do was built up on that reckless faith.

The Saint's trick of hitting back at a catastrophe with a riposte of such incredible audacity that his opponent could never make himself believe that it was nothing but the last desperate resource of a cornered man had worked for the latest of countless similar occasions in his life; even if it really provided no more than a spidery tightrope on which the abyss had still to be crossed.
I think it should probably be recourse rather than resource, but I have copied faithfully.

I'm going to Alfriston now to swap books.

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