This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the authorâs imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1995
Copyright © Michael Dobbs 1995, 2014
Michael Dobbs asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006477099
Ebook Edition © MAY 2015 © ISBN: 9780007405978
Version: 2017-10-10
Praise for The Final Cut:
âItâs that man againâ¦in Francis Urquhart he has created a true political icon. Dobbs lays fair claim to being the Quentin Tarantino of pulp fictionâ
Sunday Times
âA triumphant returnâ¦The action is unflagging, the characterization razor sharp, the satirical barbs at politics and politicians unfailingly accurateâ¦What a brilliant creation FU isâ
Sunday Telegraph
âThat we shall die, we know; âtis but the time
And drawing days out, that men stand upon.â
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Troödos Mountains, Cyprus â 1956
It was late on an afternoon in May, the sweetest of seasons in the Troödos, beyond the time when the mountains are muffled beneath a blanket of snow but before the days when they serve as an anvil for the Levantine sun. The spring air was filled with the heavy tang of resin and the sound of the breeze being shredded on the branches of great pines, like the noise of the sea being broken upon a pebbled shore. But this was many miles from the Mediterranean, almost as far as is possible to get from the sea on the small island of Cyprus.
These were good times, a season of abundance even in the mountains. For a few weeks in spring, the dust of crumbling rock chippings which passes for soil becomes a treasury of wild flowers â erupting bushes of purple-flowered sword lily, blood-dipped poppies, alyssum, the leaves and golden heads of which in ancient times were supposed to effect a cure for madness.
Yet nothing would cure the madness that was about to burst forth on the side of the mountain.
George, fifteen and almost three-quarters, prodded the donkey further up the mountain path, oblivious to the beauty. His mind had turned once again to breasts. It was a topic which seemed to demand most of his time nowadays, depriving him of sleep, causing him not to hear a word his mother said, making him blush whenever he looked at a woman, which he always did straight between her breasts. They had an energy source all their own which dragged his eyes towards them, like magnets, no matter how hard he tried to be polite. He never seemed to remember what their faces looked like, his eyes rarely strayed that far â heâd marry a toothless old hag one day. So long as she had breasts.