He further says in the preface, " I had meant the story of Scobie to enlarge a theme which I had touched on in The Ministry of Fear, the disastrous effect on human beings of pity as distinct from compassion.

His father, William Scobie MacKenzie, a medical doctor, had been born and raised in the Scottish Highlands near Lochinvar.

Scobie suspects the involvement of the local agent of a Syrian man named Yusef, a local black marketeer.

Yusef denies it, but warns Scobie that the British have sent a new inspector specifically to look for diamonds ; Scobie claims this is a hoax and that he doesn't know of any such man.

Yusef offers to lend Scobie the money at four percent per annum.

We are led to believe that Yusef arranged the death of Ali, although Scobie blames himself for the matter.

* Yusef – Syrian local black marketeer who blackmails Scobie after finding a letter in which he expresses his love for Helen.

* 2006 – Scobie Breasley, Australian jockey ( b. 1914 )

On 6 October 1854, Scottish miner James Scobie was murdered at the Eureka hotel.

Others claim that Jonathan Scobie ( or Jonathan Goble ), an American missionary to Japan, invented the rickshaw around 1869 to transport his invalid wife through the streets of Yokohama.

* In Lawrence Durrell's novel Balthazar, the second part of his Alexandria Quartet, Melissa, Scobie and Balthazar are each seen as having moments of prophetic sight.

Scobie also cross-dresses, thus implying the androgyny of Tiresias.

It deals with Catholicism and moral change in Scobie ( a police officer ) in a British West African Colony.

Major Henry Scobie, a long-serving policeman in a British colony on the West Coast of Africa during World War II, is responsible for local and wartime security.

Scobie feels responsible for her misery, but does not love her.

Scobie is a convert and devout.

Scobie is passed over for promotion to Commissioner, which upsets Louise both for her personal ambition and her hope that the local British community will begin to accept her.

Louise asks Scobie if she can go and live in South Africa to escape the life she hates.

Scobie finds it, and because it is addressed to someone in Germany, he must confiscate it in case it should contain secret codes or other clandestine information.

The captain says it ’ s a letter to his daughter and begs Scobie to forget the incident, offering him a bribe of one hundred pounds when he learns that they share a faith.

Scobie declines the bribe and takes the letter, but having opened and read it through ( thus breaking the rules ) and finding it innocuous, he decides not to submit it to the authorities, and burns it.

Scobie is called to a small inland town to deal with the suicide of the local inspector, a man named Pemberton, who was in his early twenties and left a note implying that his suicide was due to a loan he couldn ’ t repay.

Scobie later dreams that he is in Pemberton's situation, even writing a similar note, but when he awakens, he tells himself that he could never commit suicide, as no cause is worth the eternal damnation that suicide would bring.

Scobie tries to secure a loan from the bank to pay the two hundred pound fee for Louise ’ s passage, but is turned down.

Scobie initially declines, but after an incident where he mistakenly thinks Louise is contemplating suicide, he accepts the loan and sends Louise to South Africa.

One young girl dies as Scobie tries to comfort her by pretending to be her father, who was killed in the wreck.

Scobie feels drawn to her, as much to the cherished album of stamps as to her physical presence, even though she is not beautiful.

A letter he writes to Helen ends up in Yusef's hands, and the Syrian uses it to blackmail Scobie into sending a package of diamonds for him via the returning Esperança, thus avoiding the authorities.

The silence oppressed him, made him bend low over the horse's neck as if to hide from a wind that had begun to blow far away and was twisting slowly through the darkness in its slow search.

I had long since begun to lose my general innocence when I lost my trust in you, but this special innocence I lost before ever I loved, through my discovery that one could tremble with desire and even experience a flaming delight that had nothing, nothing whatever to do with friendship or liking, let alone with love.

Already Trevelyan had begun to parallel his nineteenth-century Italian studies with several works on English figures of the same period.

It is difficult to say what Thompson expected would come of their relationship, which had begun so soon after his emotions had been stirred by Maggie Brien, but when Katie wrote on April 11, 1900, to tell him that she was to be married to the Rev. Godfrey Burr, the vicar of Rushall in Staffordshire, the news evidently helped to deepen his discouragement over the failure of his hopes for a new volume of verse.

by now it was perhaps two days or longer after Papa had begun hemorrhaging.

The process of cosmopolitanism had begun in earnest about 1912, but the First War and the depression virtually stalled that process in its tracks.

It had begun with the blue jay feather.

Ever since he had first begun to study music and to teach it, Rousseau had dreamed of piercing through to fame as the result of a successful opera.

One soft evening -- that marvelous sea-blessed time when the sun's departing warmth lingers and a smell of spume and wrack haunts everything -- Amy had picked herself off the floor and begun to walk.

She had begun to turn back toward the house, but his look caught her and she stood still, waiting there for what his expression indicated would be a serious word of farewell.

They had cleaned up an old ice box and begun to buy fifty-pound blocks of ice in town, as the electric refrigerator came nowhere near providing enough ice for the crowds who ate and drank there.

He opened it a crack and in doing so made as much shuffling, coughing, and scraping noise as possible in order to drown emanations from the hen who had begun to protest.

The storms of the past had died away, and the great upheaval which was to mark the following century had not yet begun to disturb men's minds.

and moreover, he had already begun to broaden and simplify the facet-planes of Analytical Cubism as far back as the end of 1910.

Even before his death this influence had begun to ebb.

Below decks, Seaman 1/c Stanley Bishop had begun to write a letter home.

That finished the job that Captain Chandler and Lieutenant Carroll had begun.

The din was successful, too, for just before the moon disappeared, the frightened toad had begun to spit it out again, which meant good luck all around.

Radio broadcasts had not begun and most devotees of baseball attended the games near home, in the town park or a pasture, with perhaps two or three trips to the city each season to see the Cubs or the Pirates or the Indians or the Red Sox.

Sarah had begun to tell Lucien of Emile, she had begun to question and a little draft had crept across the room from the bedroom door, open barely enough to show a rim of blackness in the hall.