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• States “First Published in 1970 by The Viking Press, Inc.” on the copyright page with no additional printings listed.

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A tall old man, blind in one eye, born in Cracow but with Oxonian manners and the face of a British Museum reader, strides lightly and recklessly, rolled umbrella pointing, through the pages of Saul Bellow's novel.

Mr Arthur Sammler, who looks back on the civilized pleasures of England in the twenties and thirties, on an acquaintance with Bloomsbury and H.G. Wells, but also on the concentration camps, the war and a mass execution ditch in Poland, is above all a man who has lasted.