The Literary Firsts Test

I am a sick man . . . I am a wicked man.

Maman died today.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the middle of Los Aneles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the not said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.

In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. That was a great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fateful moment of the kind that occurs only once or twice a millennium.