The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike, #8)

by Robert Galbraith

I had dipped in life’s struggle and, out again, Bore specks of it here, there, easy to see, When I found my swan and the cure was plain; The dull turned bright as I caught your white On my bosom: you saved me—saved in vain If you ruined yourself, and all through me! Robert Browning The Worst of It

Oh often have I washed and dressed And what’s to show for all my pain? Let me lie abed and rest: Ten thousand times I’ve done my best And all’s to do again. A. E. Housman XI, Last Poems

With mounting annoyance, Robin asked herself why, if Strike had something to say, it had to be couched in these plausibly deniable terms, out of the mouth of a dead woman.

‘I’ve been hired to do a job,’ said Strike. ‘If it so happens that I have to testify in court that you’re a self-centred cunt who isn’t arsed when his desperate relatives go missing, trust me, I’ll be owning the fucking stage myself. Have a nice Christmas.’

The stars have not dealt me the worst they can do: My pleasures are plenty, my troubles are two. But oh, my two troubles they reave me of rest, The brains in my head and the heart in my breast. A. E. Housman XVII, Additional Poems

a few minutes spent watching President Trump justify his decision to curtail the emigration of Muslims to the States caused him to turn it off again.

This would be around 2017.

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go Always a little further; it may be Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow Across that angry or that glimmering sea…’ ‘What’s that?’ asked Robin. ‘Poem by James Elroy Flecker,’ said Strike. ‘Adopted as a kind of mission statement by the SAS.

While the whisky wasn’t precisely cheering him, it was at least having a numbing effect, which was better than nothing, so he ordered a fourth,

My dreams are of a field afar And blood and smoke and shot. There in their graves my comrades are, In my grave I am not. A. E. Housman XXXIX, More Poems

And he was happy, if to know Causes of things, and far below His feet to see the lurid flow Of terror, and insane distress, And headlong fate, be happiness. Matthew Arnold Memorial Verses: April, 1850