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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Brighton Rock
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(1938) Novel by Graham *Greene about the last days of a 17-year-old hoodlum, Pinkie or 'The Boy', who commits an increasingly disastrous series of crimes and cynical follies (murder, marriage, fake suicide) in an attempt to establish himself as a gangland leader in Brighton. His dream is to rival an established racketeer, Mr Colleoni (a name preceding by three decades the better-known Corleone, the gangster in The Godfather). Greene's Roman Catholicism adds another dimension to the book, for Pinkie's relentless will to evil is seen as pitted against divine grace. After Pinkie has come to a violent end, his pregnant girlfriend Rosie is told by a priest that no-one can conceive the 'strangeness of the mercy of God'.
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