Just ahead of tonight's episode in our current Tale for Our Time, a word from your humble host:
As the world bisects into lockdown and looting, I thank all of you who keep this l'il ol' website and its various activities part of your daily rounds. We try to make modest adjustments for the tenor of the times, and one such is this spring's audio format of The Mark Steyn Show, which I hope you find a cheery companion regardless of whether you are housebound by state edict or because of rampaging mobs on the street. Richard Greene, a First Day Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club from Connecticut, writes:
Thank you for always providing an interesting overview of current events by placing them in the context of past history. I don't know how you are able to investigate and disclose events from centuries ago so quickly and comprehensively. You make it look easy but I'm sure it is not. Sometimes listening to you reminds me of how great athletes or musicians do incredible things seemingly effortlessly. I also think you must have a photographic memory.
I wish I did, Richard, but alas not. Thank you for your kind words: The bit about current events and history wasn't intentional, but I confess I don't find the hyper-present-tense of media in the Internet age particularly conducive to figuring out what's going on.
So here goes with Part Eight of The Man Who Was Thursday, the classic metaphysical thriller by G K Chesterton - and accidentally timely in its exploration of the role of policemen in an age of anarchy. In tonight's episode, yet another revolutionary comrade of Symes is not what he seems:
"Did you hear me ask a plain question, you pattering spy?" he shrieked in a high, crazy voice. "Are you, or are you not, a police detective?"
"No!" answered Syme, like a man standing on the hangman's drop.
"You swear it," said the old man, leaning across to him, his dead face becoming as it were loathsomely alive. "You swear it! You swear it..! You are an anarchist, you are a dynamiter! Above all, you are not in any sense a detective? You are not in the British police?"
He leant his angular elbow far across the table, and put up his large loose hand like a flap to his ear.
"I am not in the British police," said Syme with insane calm.
Professor de Worms fell back in his chair with a curious air of kindly collapse.
"That's a pity," he said, "because I am."
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Episode Eight by clicking here and logging-in.
Earlier instalments of The Man Who Was Thursday can be found here - and thank you again for all your comments, thumbs up or down, on this latest serialization. Very much appreciated. If you'd like to know more about The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget, for fellow fans of classic fiction and/or poetry, our Steyn Club Gift Membership.
I'll see you back here tomorrow for Part Nine of The Man Who Was Thursday - and throughout the coming week for more audio delights.
