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He’s the one with the Oxford accent and amusing tales who hands around the port and cigars while he plots the hero’s demise.

Joe had boiled everything down to one action, one continuous movement, one thought: the crew’s old mantra running on through his mind like a river, hearing it over and over, not in his own voice but in George Pocock’s crisp Oxford accent, “M-I-B, M-I-B, M-I-B.”

The women were astonished to discover that these two boys whose veins flowed with Moorish and Spanish blood, and who were bom in the farthest depths of the Americas, now spoke Spanish with an Oxford accent, and that the only emotion they were capable of expressing was surprise, raising their left eyebrows.

Feet propped on a mother-of-pearl chest, he listened gravely, smoking his clay pipe, brandy in reach, his comments as mellow as his drink, Oxford accent to my liking.

He gave orders in a slow, deliberate baritone: native Igbo with an Oxford accent.