slyboots

'Steady on, Ralph,' interposed Henry, but Slyboots looked down his nose at Casey and prodded her forehead with his forefinger saying, 'Why on earth are you here?

Slyboots and footpad (which means a petty thief, one who steals on foot) are interesting in that both French and German have similar expressions: pied plat (flat foot) and leisenstreter (light treader), each meaning one who moves stealthily and for clandestine purpose.

EMERSON TELLS US that truth is "such a flyaway, such a slyboots, so untransportable and unbarrelable a commodity, that it is as bad to catch as light."' However things may be with truth, it is so with Emerson's thought.

A sickly lad, whose huge head seemed far too heavy for his feeble body, he was nevertheless an inexhaustible source of drollery and high spirits; Marx adored this cunning little slyboots." At the boy's funeral, where he was put to rest beside brother Guido and sister Franziska, a distraught Karl buried his head in his hands and howled, "You can't give my boy back to me!" A page and a half on, Wheen is back to familiar tricks, happily castigating Marx for grumbling that Jenny's uncle's death at 90 "had delayed the redistribution of his considerable wealth." We hear no more about how the loss of Edgar may have affected his father's political will and intellectual drives.

This time round the baddies are led by the mysterious, cowled Darth Sidious, who looks and sounds uncannily like silver-tongued slyboots Senator Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid).

Then, in a low snarl I did not like at all: "Yeah, Slyboots! I could tell you another story...." He lifted his glass to his lips and delved for the last few drops of liquor with his tongue.

Perhaps her revelling in secrecy (Johnson, we find, called her 'a spy' (436) and Arthur Murphy referred to her as 'Miss Slyboots' (291)) functioned as a form of self-protection; the exposure of her identity which spelled the end of her creative freedom, may well have affected her fiction-writing detrimentally.

Harrisher was Captain Rafferty's employer, and he was a likeable fellow, but his 12-year-old son Ralph, or "Slyboots" as Mrs Rafferty called him, was one spoilt vindictive little brat, and the moment Casey and Henry arrived at the party he was ready to make their lives a misery, but picking on a witch was to prove a big mistake.

Mann told his audience at Whitcoombe House he was encouraged that Slyboots, his first German purchase, has won two of his three most recent races, the latest a novices' hurdle at Stratford earlier this month.

"Pitting levity against gravity," altogether impious, The Satanic Verses is one of those go-for-broke "metafictions"-a grand narrative and a Monty Python sendup of history, religion and popular culture; Hindu cyclic and Moslem dualistic; postcolonial identity crisis and modernist pastiche; Bombay bombast and stiff-upper-liposuction; babu baby talk and ad agency neologism; cinema gossip, elephant masks, pop jingles, lousy puns, kinky sex and Schadenfreude; a sort of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid in Doris Lessing's The Four- Gated City-from which the slyboots Author-God tip-and-twinkletoes away with a cannibal grin.

It got worse for the sidelined Crosse when he had to give up another winner ride, on Slyboots in the two-mile-six-furlong novices' hurdle, on this occasion to Noel Fehily.