Dignity & Purity

Dignity & Purity It can be scary to rediscover early influences and see just how strong they were. The magic of the Web allowed me to recover recently a copy of a 1960 novel I’d read as a battered paperback in the early 70s: Dignity & Purity by Ian Jefferies. A comic masterpiece, I thought. Here’s the opening paragraph, which I’ve had by heart for thirty years.

By the time I’d got a Doctorate of Philosophy it was 1951, and things were easing up a lot throughout the country. You could buy a car if you knew someone or had no limbs at all, and people were looking smarter, except for the very rich who had nylon shirts.