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| | The New York Review of Books: New Novels |
 | | Braine had a commendable faith in the possibilities of his character Joe Lampton, it also implied that his novelistic talents, which had never struck one as particularly fertile, were being forced into the sad and dangerous course of self-imitation. |
 | | Braine is by birth and upbringing a Yorkshire Catholic, it seemed significant that there was no mention at all of Catholicism in his novels, which in other respects drew heavily and obviously on the environments which had moulded him. |
 | | Braine's novel the Catholics of Charbury are mostly of second or third generation Irish origin, who still sardonically refer to themselves as "Micks" and who occasionally frequent, in a rather embarrassed way, a decaying institution called the Hibernian Club, with its portraits of the Pope, De Valera, and James Connolly. |
| www.nybooks.com /articles/article-preview?article_id=12985 (461 words) |
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