Word: series
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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Devil of a State is now out of print, as hard to find as a bottle of whisky is in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei's capital. Barring the small amounts that non-Muslim visitors are allowed to bring in for their own use, alcohol is banned in today's Islamic Brunei. The present restrictions would have greatly dismayed Francis Burroughs Lydgate, the controller of passports, whom Burgess's book revolves around. Graying, thin, his teeth full of rot, 50-year-old Frank has married three times and hasn't been back to England in 24 years, working jobs from...
...clearly modeled after 1950s oil-rich, Anglophile Brunei. In Devil of a State a half-deaf U.N. adviser lives in the Residency, a version of the Bubungan Dua Belas, where British residents and high commissioners in Brunei lived until Brunei achieved full independence in 1984. Some streets in Bandar Seri Begawan retain their colonial names (Pretty, Stoney, McArthur), while the wooden House of Twelve Roofs is now a museum hung with photographs feting Brunei's "special relationship" with Britain. It helps to explain all the lingering British traces today: Queen Elizabeth II Street; a bright blue St. Andrew's Anglican...