All Souls Read Online Free PDF

straightforwardly phallic, it doesn't matter; but anyone wishing to survive there must have (or must obtain without delay) some sort of transmissible data. Giving information about something is, moreover, the only way of not having to give out information about oneself, and thus, the more misanthropic, independent, solitary or mysterious the Oxonian in question, the more information about other people one would expect him to provide in order to excuse his own reserve and gain the right to remain silent about his own private life. The more one knows and tells about other people, the greater one's dispensation not to reveal anything about oneself. Consequently the whole of Oxford is fully and continuously engaged in concealing and suppressing itself whilst at the same time trying to winkle out as much information as possible about other people, and from there comes the tradition - true — and the myth - also true - of the high quality, great efficiency and virtuosity of the dons and teachers of Oxford and Cambridge when it comes to the dirtier work involved in spying and of their continued employment by both British and Soviet governments who vie for their services as prestigious agents -single, double and triple (Oxonians have sharper ears, Cantabrigians fewer scruples). However, the effect of this is that the aforementioned right to remain silent about one's private life is reduced literally to just that, that is, to saving oneself the humiliation and embarrassment of having to own up and make it public knowledge oneself, since, given the universal need to supply information about other people in order not to have to divulge anything about oneself, the very information that one avoids giving, others (a whole host of them) covet, spy out, pursue, track down, obtain and end up broadcasting in order, in turn, to avoid having to reveal any information about themselves. Some weak spirits (only a few) give it up as a bad job right from the start and, with a reprehensible lack of resistance and modesty, make a full public confession of their private affairs. Though frowned upon because of the frank, easygoing and heterodox attitude it reveals towards the game, this is permitted because it is seen as both unconditional surrender and abject submission. On the other hand, some virtuosi in the field manage, in spite of everything, to keep secret their habits, vices, tastes and practices (perhaps by dint of renouncing all habits, vices, tastes and practices), which does not, of course, prevent other people from inventing and attributing to them every vice they can think of; however, the variety and resultant contradictions in such incongruous and motley reports tend to make one distrust their veracity. Occasionally, though, such virtuosi (but they have to be real virtuosi) do get their own way and no one really knows any hard facts about them at all. Rook was without a doubt an eminent member of that class (such a consummate master of the art, you'd think he'd been trained by the Soviets). Apart from his absolute commitment to his monumental translation and his encounter with Vladimir Vladimirovich in Britain's former colonies, nothing was known about him (his personal life was a blank) and, on the other hand, one could take it for granted that anything he knew would, the instant he knew it, rapidly pass into the realm of popular knowledge.
    When I arrived twenty minutes early at her office in Catte Street, the morning after seeing Rook, crumpled and asleep, on the London train and imagining we'd heard his footsteps behind ours in the windy streets of the empty city, Clare was calmly reading the newspaper. (She opened the door to me, one finger keeping her place between the pages. She didn't kiss me.) Whilst she seemed to have slept well enough, I had barely slept a wink, so I had no option but to come straight to the point and ask her the question I'd asked myself again and again during that long, sleepless night ("Had she or had she