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| | Books | Touched by the past |
 | | Hilary Wainwright, poet and intellectual, is enduring a grim wartime Christmas at his stiflingly suburban mother's house when a Frenchman, Pierre, turns up to give him news of the small son that he had to leave in occupied France. |
 | | You can even tell, from the care she has taken with the dialogue, that Hilary's speech has been translated from the kind of French an Englishman like him would speak, while his French interlocutors' dialogue has been translated from proper French. |
 | | She has got a certain kind of British intellectual down to a tee: selfish, timorous, hyper-sensitive, anxious, always dismayed at whatever has been suggested yet going along with it anyway, and ready to dismiss a friend on a point of political principle. |
| books.guardian.co.uk /print/0,3858,4257170-99930,00.html (550 words) |
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