Finally he asked me a question about Adams’ real standing in the community. Did he have authority? At the time I had been following the serialisation of James Clavell’s Japanese opus, Shogun, on TV, and this prompted me to answer rather waspishly, ‘Of course, he’s the Shogun.’ Triumphantly Emery replied to the effect that the term ‘Shogun’ had a military connotation. That brief exchange, deployed in such a way as to indicate that I supported the programme’s thesis – namely that Adams had a ‘spurious legitimacy’ and had merely adopted ‘the guise of community politician’ – was the only snippet
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