Sublime

For American taxpayers, the Savings and Loans debacle was a hugely expensive lesson in the perils of ill-considered deregulation.

“It takes a long time to drive to … the Bu.”

untrammelled money-grubbing was a way of life – nay, a raison d’être. Furthermore it didn’t matter how the rich made their pile: waste disposal, trailer parks, sex toys, plastic forks, rubber doorstops, pornographic magazines, torture equipment, edible goldfish, mines, contraceptive sheaths, trading in widows and orphans, it . . . just . . . didn’t

Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off.

That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned