"Ian R. Macleod - The Summer Isles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

odd corners such as this, where, despite the potential for confusion, I find myself reluctant to give them up.
As my thoughts drift toward all the odd accidents in life that have brought me here-and how, indeed, Fingers of
History would be a good description of some historical process or other-another part of me watches Doctor Parker as
he then raises the cover of my file a few inches to peer sideways into it.
Something changes behind his eyes. But when he clears his throat and smoothes back down the papers and finally
makes the effort to meet my gaze, I'm still certain that I'm fully prepared for the worst. What could be more terrible,
after all, than growing old, or emphysema, bronchitis, tuberculosis...?
"It seems," he begins, "that a tumor has been growing in your lungs... Outwardly, you're still in good enough health, but
I really doubt if there's point in an operation."
Not even any need for an operation! A stupid bubble of joy rises up from my stomach, then dissolves.
I lick my lips. "How long," I ask, "have I got?"
"You'll need to make plans. I'm so terribly sorry...."

Thrust upon the gleaming linoleum rivers of the new NHS, I am kept so busy at first that there is little time left for
anything resembling worry. There are further X-rays at the Radcliffe, thin screens behind which I must robe and disrobe
for the benefit of cold-fingered but sympathetic men who wear half-moon glasses. Nurses provide me with over-sweet
tea and McVitie's Digestives. Porters seek my opinion about Arsenal's chances in the FA Cup.
I feel almost heroic. And for a while I am almost grateful for the new impetus that my condition gives to a
long-planned project of mine. A book not of history, but about history. One which examines, much as a scientist might
examine the growth of a culture, the way that events unfold, and attempts to grapple with the forces that drive them.
The Fingers of History? The odd way that inspiration sometimes arrives when you're least looking for it, I may even have
stumbled upon a title; serious and relevant to the subject, yet punning at the same time on my own small moment of
popular fame in the Daily Sketch.
After years of grappling with the sense of being an impostor that has pervaded most of my life, I suddenly find that I
am making good progress in writing the pivotal chapter about Napoleon. Was he a maker of history, or was he its
servant? Of course, he was both-and yet it is often the little incidents, when history is approached from this angle, which
stand large. Questions such as, what would have happened if his parents Carlo and Letizia had never met?-which normal
historians would discount as ridiculous-suddenly become a way of casting new light.
 But one post-hospital afternoon a week or so later, as I huddle over my desk, and the warm air drifting through my
open window brings the chant and the tread of Christlow and his fellow EA members parading on the ancient grass of our
college quad, the whole process suddenly seems meaningless. Now, I can suddenly see the futility of all the pages I
have written. I can see, too, the insignificant and easily filled space that my whole life will soon leave. A few clothes
hanging in a wardrobe, an old suitcase beneath a bed, some marks on a toilet cubicle wall. Who, after all, am I, and what
possible difference does it make?
Pulling on my jacket, empty with fear, I head out into Oxford as evening floods in.

I was born in Lichfield-which, then as now, is a town that calls itself a city-in the year 1880. It's middle England,
neither flat nor hilly, north or south. Barring Doctor Johnson being born and a messy siege in the Civil War, nothing much
has ever happened there. My father worked for Lichfield Corporation before he died of a heart attack one evening while
tending his allotment. He'd had a title that changed once or twice amid great glory and talk of more ambitious holidays,
but he'd always been Assistant-this and Deputy-that-one of the great busy-but-unspecified ("Well, it's quite hard to
explain what I do unless you happen to be in the same line yourself...") who now so dominate this country.
My mother and I were never that stretched; we had his pension and his life insurance, and she took on a job working
at Hindley's cake shop, and brought home bits of icing and angelica for me when they changed the window display. By
this time, I'd already decided I wanted to be "a teacher." Until I passed into Secondary School from Stowe Street
Elementary, I was always one of the brightest in my class. Even a County Scholarship to Rugby seemed within reach. And
from there, yes, I was already dreaming of the Magdalene Deer, sleek bodies bathing in the Cherwell at Parson's
Pleasure.
My later years in school, though, were a slog. Partly from struggling to keep pace among cleverer lads, I fell ill with
something that may or may not have been scarlet fever. On my long stay away from school, a boy called Martin Dawes