"Borrowed Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goddard Robert)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For help and advice freely and generously given me during the planning and writing of this novel, I sincerely thank the following.

Jonathon and Susan Stoodley and their many friends in Brussels, notably Xavier Lewis and Nicholas Chan, without whom Robin Timariot’s career as a fonctionnaire titulaire de la Commission Européenne would never have begun, but upon whom his disillusionments were in no way based; Alistair Brown of the Home Office Prison Department and Colin Symons, Assistant Governor of Albany Prison, who enabled me to imagine the life Shaun Naylor would have led inside; Nigel Pascoe, who proved a more enlightened judge than I would ever have been; and, last but by no means least, Malcolm McCarraher, who must sometimes have regretted offering to apply his expert mind to legal conundrums arising from the plot but never once complained.

I am also grateful to the Governor of Albany Prison for allowing me access to the institution; to Hugh Barty-King, author of Quilt Winders and Pod Shavers, a book which played a vital part in the literary genesis of Timariot amp; Small, cricket bat manufacturers of Petersfield, whose story this partly is; and to the late Edward Thomas, whose poems supplied a wonderfully evocative and eerily appropriate sub-text to many of the scenes I described. (Those specifically quoted from are, in order of reference, “The Cherry Trees,” “After You Speak,” “It Was Upon,” “Celandine,” “The Unknown,” “What Shall I Give?,” “Like the Touch of Rain,” “The Other,” “When First” and “Early One Morning.”)