A Million Minute Twinkling Mirrors of silver light greet the cold dawn as the first rays of sun pierce through the light mist lying at the base of the foothills. From the hills above it seems almost as if the fields have come alive with stars as slight breezes play through the long grasses, disturbing the silent activity of countless spiders and tiny creatures of the night, and rustle webs covered in the finest shimmering of dew.
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In the village surrounded by these silent fields next to nothing stirs. The houses remain forcibly dark inside their age compacted walls with heavily-backed fashion curtains pulled tight across the windows, doors locked as if to ward off the terrors of the night, and all inhabitants tucked safely inside their warm, cocoon-like beds. Only the solitary remaining dairy farmer stirs on this cold Saturday morning, dressing against the predicted cold as he thinks about the day ahead: bringing in the cows for milking, checking the feed and finishing the paperwork for the milk quota on last month’s collection.
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The houses in the village are old and weather-beaten, but sturdy and full of an indefinable character. Their mixture of wood supports and brickwork epitomises a history full of farm workers and long, hard winters. Times have changed around the centre of this beautiful, olde worlde village, leaving the essential character, to all intents and purposes, unchanged. But for the tarmac on the roads and a few traffic signs the years could still be of the last century; the clock could have stood still and the rest of the world passed by unnoticed, unhindered: if you ignore the proliferation of new housing springing up around the hazy boundaries, eating into the once movingly farmed land. The passage of time would have been a minor disturbance perhaps, like the breeze playing through the lush green fields outside the village boundaries, and nothing more. The inner character has changed too, and the village is no longer what it was. There are modern, fast cars parked in driveways where once farm vehicles stood. Barns and outhouses have been converted into dens, studios and guest rooms. Vegetable gardens have become lawns, patios and terraces with plastic furniture, barbecue grills and swings for the children to argue over. Time has brought a new generation into and around the village, and ushered out the hard working camaraderie of the farmer and his close circle of friends and fellow workers. Few people know their neighbours on more than nodding terms and the doors are locked tight not only at night.
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This is now the world of the professional and his or her family. This is the home village of those who can afford to escape from the pressures of the city and relax with their families each night in the silence of the countryside, and enjoy the pleasures of long weekends in the garden, or the conservatory overlooking the garden on colder days, viewing the moss-lined banks of the winding brook and the larger river that it finally empties into. This is the world of advertising executives, high-flyers and high earners; the world of cultivated people earning enough to oust the old-style inhabitants, install central heating and relax with their suitably clad feet raised to rest upon a stool or designer-leather pouffe, where original oils hang on the walls, limited edition prints and large format, colourful art books adorn the other hanging and shelf spaces. Where tall green broad-leafed plants add the darker colours of nature to the presently fashionable cream or off-white lightness of the designer-painted walls, tapestry-based carpets and country-style city furniture and where artistic and literary or political periodicals are displayed face-up on coffee tables in a clear display of fashion-conscious respectability, of culture- conscious education, and politically-safe awareness.
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This is the tunnel-vision world where my much vaunted works are devoured by people of suitable taste and discernment, families of culture, but not necessarily of learning. My creations are the fashion statements of the times and, therefore, a requisite for the correct display of culture and scholarship. My books are carefully and prominently displayed, spine facing outwards on shelves for the older titles, prominent at the bedside or on writing desks for the latest, allowing bookish visitors to marvel over on rainy days when the garden is too damp to walk through and when the dog has simply been let out, unleashed, to fend for itself. They are the tomes of a literary culture that have been at the centre of a rapid but limited revival in literary interest since the reviewer in The Sunday Times book section informed his readers that to be without a copy of my first and, naturally, each subsequent title was to be without an understanding of the progression of the modern cultured world. In houses such as these, tucked away in villages over-run by the emigrating population of cities and major towns, collections of my complete works in individual volumes are de rigueur, preferably first editions to show true culture and learning. Unlike our famous hero in Bonfire of the Vanities I am not just the man of the moment anymore; I will survive for longer than Andy Warhol’s oft quoted quarter of an hour, be more than a mere nine-minute-wonder. I am a snapper- up of unconsidered trifles. Widely accepted as the epitome of character, the centre of literary learning, the source of countless suitable quotations and endless references to the written cultures of our shared language and the trendsetter, the leader even, of an intellectual revival and that all because of one review countless provincial and international periodicals picked up upon and followed: all because of one short critique which lavished praise on a minor literary work of surprisingly little merit which would never, otherwise, have seen even the long list of an artistic award or literature prize of any recognisable worth in a month of Sundays. I have been called the modern Shakespeare.
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But there seems to be almost an eleventh commandment, I commented upon it at one time in a letter to my publisher, that single women should not read my works: and what is even more extraordinary they seem not to have broken it. But literature can be of little importance to the poor, dear things, after all, the reading or non-reading of a book has never managed to keep down a single petticoat, or prevented a single pair of skimpy panties from slipping to the ankles and beyond. This was hardly a publicity stunt on my part: publicity was the last thing that I needed when my comments were allowed to slip out into the public domain to raise a veritable storm of enraged feminist indignation. No, the problem is that I have found women to be far more cultured, far more aware of a literary sense in life than their much vaunted men folk. Which, it would seem, is a point well proven when they remained away from my initial works in droves, to say the least, and few if any female critics turned their pens - poisoned or otherwise - in a critical fashion towards the many outpourings appearing under my name until later.
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They have, I fear, seen something in my earlier works that the male readers tended to overlook, or remained innocently unaware of. They have seen, I suspect, the influences of previous lives reappearing within the words on my pages, and the lives of other literatures gracing the otherwise innocent white papers under my name and with my pen playing their words into other meanings, other phrases and new contexts of the times.
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Was it not Alexander Dumas père who had to be forcibly prevented from signing copies of Homer’s Iliad when a new translation by another author appeared? Is there not a better example of a writer of skill and vision who transforms words into a new meaning, who crafts them into modern terminology and connotation and breathes new life into the dead trousers of previous thought? Indeed, I justify myself with the thought of Shakespeare who relied upon the history of Holinshead’s Chronicles, amongst other works of historical significance, so completely in the creation of what we see today as masterpieces of skill and learning, and which we teach to our children as the finest examples of our common heritage and shared language.
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It was the indefatigable influence of Shakespeare that drove me to write works of disputable literary merit. The self-same Shakespeare who is often the unacknowledged inspiration behind so much that is written in the English language today, but who has never graced the pages of my humble works. I read Shakespeare at school, pored over him at home, devoured him at college, and at university I remained an avid servant to his words until I had the histories, tragedies and comedies in their entirety stuffed into my brain and veritably pouring out of my ears. To the less philosophical reader it should be clear that the so passionate young man that I had grown into precipitated through ‘a shivered Universe’ in this extraordinary way, and had only one of three things which he could next do: establish himself in Bedlam; begin writing Satanic Poetry or blow out his brains. In the process towards any of which consummations, would not such readers anticipate extravagance enough; breast- beating, brow-beating (against walls), lion-bellowings of blasphemy and the like, stampings, smitings, breakages of furniture, if not arson itself? I partook of none of these. I resolved to find my influences and inspirations and place them firmly and forever on paper and, in a moment perhaps of respite from the various acts of violence I might have considered, I approached a periodical seeking an offer of publication.
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The attitude towards literary publication, I discovered, is almost exactly what I could wish; great respect, even love, from some few; much matter of thought given to me for instruction and high edification by the very baseness and ignorance of the many. It was this baseness and ignorance of historical works, even those of the most recent past, that brought me my success. The short article, on some quite insignificant subject within Milton’s Paradise Lost that I now fail to recall, is significant as a turning point between wishful thinking and career for several reasons. Leaving aside the fact that it was my first attempt at scholarly dissertation outside the otherwise all enclosing university environment, leaving aside the muted hope that it would be treated as such a work of scholarship, it was published in an overly edited form which removed all the necessary quotation marks and effectively rendered the piece into a work of highly intellectual fiction. It was a marked success. The editor, I forget his name, printed it with the comment that its young author should ‘go far’. He did not prophesy how far, or of what advantage such a peripatetic future might be to me. This, my first appearance in print, was a sufficient confirmation of my assurance that I had found my métier. All the anger, the guilt, the frustration of past years disappeared, and I believed that I had taken the place reserved for me among those ’stars of morning’ who sang together, in that song of praise which is overheard in every generation, by seers and innocents who believe they have found the key to the secret of the universe.
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An editorial error of the greatest possible significance, a moment’s oversight that changed lives; not an excuse for my future career as an acceptable and suitable, indeed more than suitable, author of works of considerable merit and public acclaim. A mere statement of fact, a passage of history, the turn of fate. As an accomplished author I admit that writing is a dangerous trade, but I am not deterred any more than is the airman or seaman by risks of a different sort. Besides, I know that my gamble, my mining and quarrying (for that, in a measure, it is), may yield me a diamond or a nugget infinitely precious, indeed beyond price. As to my rewards, long before future ills can descend upon me they remain as variable as the winds and oceans. A writer can be paid, as I have been, negligible sums for writing their heart out and two or three thousand pounds a week for doing mighty little. A dangerous trade indeed, and I have chosen, it would seem, the danger of future discovery and vilification for the benefits of the higher payments and sundry rewards of the present.
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I am not alone. Sir James Thornhill, Hogarth’s father-in-law, is an example of my art exemplified through his that cannot be overlooked, although the artistic variation between painter of vision and painter of words, some might argue, renders the medium of visual art far more acceptable to popular taste and sensibilities. In this case, and merely to support mine, the event he was going to paint was the landing of George I in England in 1714, following the debate over succession and the search through Germany, as the whole became known following Bismarck’s political and military efforts, for a new King to the English throne. The scene, he decided, was unsuitable in many respects for the auspices of this great moment, to be preserved for posterity it required far more subtlety than the great crowds afforded and the personal awkwardness of obviously unsuitable, outmoded styles of dress. It required the leaving out of people now in public disgrace, lightness of an evening sky replacing the darkness of night, the insertion of five or six nobles of higher stature otherwise engaged on this propitious occasion, the changing of dress to a more modern style and of less uncomplimentary appearance, the lessening in extent of the watching crowds and the inclusion of guns firing a welcoming salute. So it is with my own work. The leaving out of what is awkward in my writing style, and the insertion at suitable junctures of things that are not strictly part of the original mental scene, not a truthfully part of the authentic imagined event but an amalgamation of other previous events, other clear visions, inspirations and words.
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But to leave my lonely justification and return once more to the quiet village nestling quietly amid the hills on this cold, grey Saturday morning.
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The village, which is how I shall continue to term it despite the growing size and the recent influx of outsiders, the expanding businesses, property development and expulsion of the original community, gradually begins to come to life. From my vantage point above, nestling warmly wrapped and coated in the vale between bedewed hillocks, I see the farmer gathering his herd to bring them into the stalls and gain their precious milk. The young tousle-haired boy from the newsagent’s, still yawning with memories of sleep and early awakening has gathered his reinvigorated morning strength together to cycle dutifully, garbed in raincoat and scarf, with the heavy sack of newspapers through the modern housing estate roads and the old village lanes delivering the events of yesterday and the opinions of tomorrow in print to those with a need for seemingly intelligent occupation at the family breakfast table. The milkman’s electric truck coasts down the winding lane to the east bringing back the goods removed from the farmer in the days before in small litre packages where once a glass-bottled pint was demanded. Fruit yoghurts, wholemeal bread and brown-shelled eggs cram into a cooled back compartment for those unwilling to venture into the centre so early on this dull day, or those unfortunate few who have forgotten the minor purchases required to breakfast the day before, and those not on terms with the farmer and his limited supply of fresh and free-range delights. The milkman will spend an hour or so in the village and new estate before trundling back across the hill to his dairy, producing the receipts book and cash paid to his supervisor and gathering supplies for the next route outwards. This was the last call on his route in this direction through the hills after a succession of hamlets and out of the way nestlings of houses and farms, hidden from the prying chequebooks of property and countryside developers determined to preserve the traditions of the rustic past while enhancing the lifestyles of their clientele, and especially the burgeoning balances of their personal accounts. This is the longest of several routes he has to drive, but also still the most peaceful, where his thoughts could, perhaps, turn to dreams of greatness, heroic deeds and a life of fulfilment beyond the mild, uninspiring callings of his milk round. His final route of the day takes in the high-rise estates growing like a plague by the county town: to steps and stairs that stretch into the very reaches of the heavens as this haven of peace and tranquillity lies still and barely stirring beneath them.
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The tranquillity and earliest education of my childhood inhabits the crooks and corners of houses in this backwater struggling rather than coming to terms with an encroaching civilisation: a seemingly alien society that had previously sneered at the bumpkins of the open lands. The magic of straw and dung strewn farmyards teeming with tethered or penned animals and overpowering country smells infests my mind today as it insinuated itself into and inspired my senses then. Trips into the county market town were an adventure: an opportunity to experience the manner in which town- and city- folk dwelt and managed the limited perspectives of their lives. The town was full of life and vitality, a thriving marketplace for country products, gossip and cheerful greetings amongst separated friends and family, an inspirational treat for a youngster of curious nature used to the silences and quiet ways of country retreat. The subscription library had its small frontage on the market square itself, and invited many a glance and longing hope that one day the blue-painted door might admit my youthful curiosity raised as I was on Shakespeare and the Bible to joys and revelations of an exciting literary outside world. I can envisage to this day that bow-fronted house tucked between butcher and baker calling out, pleading to be explored: almost begging for the tomes of knowledge and experience to be brought down from the densely packed shelves, handled and praised: thought over, read and, finally, returned to their hallowed niche by an all the more wiser child.
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From my silent vantage point high in the hills, I can now see what the adventure of city life has finally become to me, and how it resurrects memories of times long thought destined to remain as forgotten dust deep in my sub consciousness. The moss and lichen covered walls of the old village are bordered with pristine stonework, mortar and flagstones newly laid for the dainty feet of fashion-conscious wives and smartly turned- out children, for the suited husbands returning clutching full briefcase, daily newspaper and car keys in hand, to their personal castles away from the stress and frustrations of city practices. Gone are the rolling fields I roamed through, the tiny rivulets and drainage ditches I joyfully splashed across, the heaps of freshly streaming dung to be marvelled over and avoided as I ran, calling and singing towards the wood’s edge across a field surrounded by stonewalls and hedges full of character and history. The land is flat and pristine, almost barren in its lack of variety, with photo-magazine gardens, and designer homes that seem, in their perfection and false stillness, to be cloned one from another and placed, rigidly, in an order of rank never to be disturbed, mocked or altered to the slightest degree. Life is a prescribed order to be followed, where only chaos and joy had formerly reigned, and a childhood of experiences gained had grown into an adulthood of outward conformity and respectability disguising the truth of character.
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And sitting in my safe haven of the snug fold between these hills, I can ponder as the world comes back to life beneath me, what has brought me back to this backwater of personal history and what, if anything, the future is likely to hold for tomorrow, or next week, next month and each succeeding period of time after that.
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The immediate future is secure. My immediate future until the dawning of this dreaded Sunday morning is almost set in concrete it is so certain in my mind what will happen. But long before that terrible dawning of truth and revelation I shall rise from my comfortable king-of-the-castle position, shake off the moisture that has accumulated during my long vigil, and eventually make my calm and composed way back along the thin winding farm track to the village inn, The Nineteen Archers, in the High Street below me. There a hearty breakfast will be served by a buxom country wench, and the other members of my celebratory party will gradually put in an appearance at the dining room entrance. The ignorant collection of publicist, agent and editor. They will undoubtedly pause for well rehearsed effect, look about them as if in disbelief that such a rustic den of antiquity can still exist in the modern world; they will see me, display a pristine pearl-white smile or raise a perfectly manicured hand in greeting and wander, nonchalantly, pausing at appropriate junctures for some desired effect, to our shared table. Greetings will be exchanged, comments on the day’s plans, the weather, the region, the pleasures of the previous night’s celebration.
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Looks of remembrance that this is my home village, no matter the passage of years, perhaps tinged with the hint of pity that one as brilliant, and profitable, as I should have been subjected to such an uncivilised upbringing as can only have happened in such a regressed area as this so obviously is. Thank heavens, they may even think, for the advances in university education and resources of university libraries in bringing this brilliant man, this genius of the pen and master of the written word out of the darkness of such a desolate, deserted backwater, and into the light and might of the city and its flourishing literary and publishing circles. If they should only realise half of the truth, one tenth of the true tale behind the success story sitting at their breakfast table, sharing their laughter and idle banter, either from my past or their present, I suspect the pearly white smiles would fade through some forced, temporary incomprehension, their wrinkle-free brows would furrow in thought above dimly clouded eyes, and their hands fidget uncontrollably as a spark, a mere snippet of light and truth makes its steady way through the haze of their befuddled, addled brains to infest them with a fear they cannot yet imagine. It will be the fear for their very survival, for their integrity, for their positions in the London community, in publishing and literary circles of which they are so proud and amongst their friends to whom, on countless occasions, they have praised the printed sheets I place before their editors.
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I know that sudden fear for survival when something unthinkable occurs to upset the balance from my own childhood days: despite the joys of the country life and the fascination of the monthly outings to the colourful marketplace with its bustle and strange unfamiliarity; I understand the fear that everything must and can only change for the worst and that the good times are all behind us, all a matter of memory never to be relived, only the potential regretted. I lost a parent of a character so virtuous and endearing at an early period in my childhood, my prime misfortune, and which contributed perhaps in the highest degree to the dark colouring of my subsequent life. The influence of a good mother on the first years of her children, whether nature has given them peculiar strength, or a peculiar delicacy of frame, is equally inestimable: it is the prerogative and the felicity of such a mother to temper the arrogance of the strong, and to dissipate the timidity of the tender. That tempering, dissipating, calming influence was lost before I was ten summers old and only the rigours of my far sterner, detached and still sorrowing father and his struggles to remain in business in the confines of this small village during the hardships that followed remained behind next to the memories of what became, with the passage of time, an image of female, motherly perfection.
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Had the strictness of my father abated once so much so that he allowed me, when I finally read a book other than Shakespeare and the Bible, to pay a visit to the region it described, I should have felt that I was making an enormous advance towards the ultimate conquest of truth. For, even when I had the continuous sensation of being enveloped in and surrounded by my physical being, it still didn’t seem a fixed and immoveable prison; rather I seemed to be borne away with it, and yet perpetually struggling to transcend it, to break out into the world, with an interminable sense of discouragement from that unvarying humming sound all around me which is not an echo from without, but a knowledge of reality from within. I tried to discover in things, which became more precious to me on that very account, the reflection of what my soul and imagination had projected. And so, for example, if I always imagined the perfect and loving woman that was my mother being in and a part of the setting I most longed at the time to visit, if I wished that it were she who showed its wonders to me, who opened to me the gates of an otherwise unknown world, then it was indeed my mother who returned to me in all her perfection and brought calm and inspiration to my otherwise tormented longings.
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But the tale of my relationship to my father, his unforgiving ways, pedantry and strictness must be reserved for another time, as might the delightful memories I hold, or have conjured up around the image of my dear mother. For now, wrapped in the warmth of my all enveloping clothes, I am more concerned with the immediate future and while the ancient past is inextricably bound together with what must occur in this village in the hours still to come, once this cold, grey Saturday has drawn to a final, lamented close, they need not concern my thoughts further yet.
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There is, in the corner of a sparingly green field below my gaze and to the west of the village, a small patch of earth reserved exclusively, secretly, by me. Underneath this insignificant sod lies the last tiny remnant of my childhood innocence, the few futile grains of purity that vanished like the north wind when my chosen career became what it is today. It is this corner of a long forgotten meadow that I needed to visit this weekend: that I needed to re-explore and then dig up in a final effort to understand why someone I have never truly met would wish to bury a razor-edged hatchet in the back of my head, and twist and turn until it cuts a swath through my guts and forces the very essence of my troubled soul to spill upon the untilled ground covering the pleasures of my youthful inexperience. It is more than a symbolic burial ground. It is the quiet resting place beneath the turmoil of heavens of what everyone else expected from me: what all those well-meaning teachers and friends, colleagues and acquaintances regarded as being the correct path for a youth of my disposition to follow. It is the corner of a barren paddock where I stood gazing back towards my father’s farm the night he finally, savagely and bitterly, left this earth and I decided to sell, to run, to live my life away from the foul memories of penned-in youth, as the brightly lit, inspired adult my mind and body had become upon my own course, in my own positive direction. It was the night, beneath the self-same stars that twinkled down upon us last night, beyond the roof of the hotel bar, that I shed all pretence and admitted to myself what I was, what I had been and accepted what it was I must become. It is a corner of my past that I have not had the nerve to walk across to once more and confront, and which I can only gaze down upon from this high, safe vantage point. My toasts to success last night were smothered with hidden meanings, double-edged and cutting that flew over the heads of others and which only I have the insight of a lived and misspent past to fully comprehend.
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I extracted a child’s life from its surroundings and superimposed an adult version upon the then cold and unknown environs of the city of dreams: the city whose pavements are covered in gold: the city of the golden mile, in my youthful mind. The city of hopes, dreams and riches.
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And tomorrow morning it will all shatter like the house of cards that it truly is. The officials will pull my ivory tower down about my ears for illegal trading, my castle will have its moat drained and the turrets toppled to lie in weed infested grass, an example of the folly that everything in my poor, miserable life has become. It is a drug that I have taken all these years: the drug of eternal youth through fame and riches; the prescription has finally expired.
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Tomorrow morning the Sunday newspapers will explode upon this quiet village and shatter its solitude and respectability. That is why, after all these years, I, the successful author whose books line the shelves of the rich and successful, of the middling-rich and aspiring classes, of the fashion-conscious and the easily-led, have returned here to my roots. My life began as an author here, it was born here, metaphorically speaking, and it shall die here in a blaze of glory and bewonderment. Tomorrow, when the Sunday newspapers reveal, as I believe that they must do, that everything I have ever written has been written before, has been expressed in other words, has had another author’s name on the title page and I, like others less successful before me, have taken those words and crafted them into my story, into my style and language for these poor saps with no thoughts of their own to devour and wonder over but, God forbid, never to raise a sign of personal intelligence in their addled brains or turn their softened minds to thoughts of higher things.
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And it has taken a student, a fledgling of eighteen, a junior reporter of previously total insignificance achieving her fifteen minutes of fame to show that, even in the shortest autobiographical writings sprouting from my pen there are the words of Byron, Carlyle, Church, Froude, Hayley, Hodson, Pevsner and Proust hidden, reworked into new meanings and that I am the most successful, unrepentant plagiarist of all time.
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