With a Bare Bodkin Quotes

“Glad to see you, Pettigrew. Are you defending the bigamy to-morrow?” “Alas! I am neither prosecuting nor defending. In fact, I am here on false pretences. For the time being, I am the lowest thing in the scale of human creation.” The Clerk’s bushy eyebrows met in a frown. “You’re not going to tell me you’ve been summoned on a jury?” he said incredulously.”
― Cyril Hare, With a Bare Bodkin

“I’ve got my rights, haven’t I? If I choose to say nothing, I suppose I can. It’s no use your trying to use third degree methods on me.” “Nowadays,” said Mallett quietly, “people of your sort usually call them ‘Gestapo methods’. You should try to be a little more up to date.”
― Cyril Hare, With a Bare Bodkin

“It is hideous to contemplate such things occurring in a department under my control,” he said. “But what can one expect with the material at one’s command? The temporary civil servant is the bane of government in war-time.”
― Cyril Hare, With a Bare Bodkin

“The other was until a fortnight ago in the occupation of a liaison officer from the Ministry of Manpower, when the Treasury in its wisdom decided that co-operation with other branches of the Government was a luxury that could not be tolerated in time of war.”
― Cyril Hare, With a Bare Bodkin

“Obviously not,” said Pettigrew, beginning to feel like a participant in one of Plato’s dialogues when Socrates really got going.”
― Cyril Hare, With a Bare Bodkin

“All his working life had been spent in resolving other people’s problems, but they had been the problems of strangers, dealt with at arm’s length through the medium of a solicitor, and considered in the quiet, dust-laden atmosphere of the Temple, where matters of life and death, fortune and bankruptcy resolved themselves into carefully phrased opinions and the comparison of reported cases.”
― Cyril Hare, With a Bare Bodkin

“In a word (which he had coined specially for the occasion) he disliked his unsnubbability.”
― Cyril Hare, With a Bare Bodkin

“the Controller, blond, fattish, and a little bald, lunching tête-à-tête with the head of the Export Department, one of the few other permanent Civil Servants in the Control. In their neat, black suits, and with their serious, aloof expressions, they contrived to bring into their incongruous surroundings an indefinable atmosphere of Whitehall.”
― Cyril Hare, With a Bare Bodkin

“Who do you suppose the Nicey Priors were?” asked Pettigrew, beginning to chuckle again. “They sound an amiable crowd of old gentlemen.” “I don’t know, I’m sure,” said Miss Brown, blushing uncomfortably, “but that is what you dictated, Mr. Pettigrew.” She began to turn over the leaves of her shorthand notes. “No doubt it was. Don’t bother to turn it up. It was my fault for not explaining that I was talking lawyer’s Latin, and with a lawyer’s false quantities at that.” He crossed out the words, wrote in “Nisi Prius”, and murmured, “Poor old Priors! I’m quite sorry to see them go. But they had no business in the Court of Exchequer. Their proper place obviously was the Council of Nicea.”
― Cyril Hare, With a Bare Bodkin