And yet none of them had been quite convincing. Once you’ve seen someone firing peas out of his nostril, or trying and failing, for a full fifteen minutes, to climb over a gym horse, it’s difficult to take him seriously as a top legislator for the UN or a hedge-fund manager at a private bank, no matter how many years have passed. The hall had seemed to Howard no less full of burlesques and pastiches than it does tonight. And he was the pastiche poster-boy, for he had actually switched sides from being one of the students to being one of the teachers, from child, as it were, to grown-up – and
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