Problems, Problems

The Strategic Adviser's office occupied the council's top floor: framed degrees, a view of the basin, and a poster on the wall reading SOCIOLOGY THAT WORKS. Roland Keast was fifty-eight, silver hair swept back, and he polished his glasses on a pocket handkerchief while he thought, a small, careful, almost tender habit.

"I'm told you left a university rather than be useful," he said. "I stayed and was useful. We shall have to disagree about which of us wasted our training."

"Marian thought a sociologist should stand with the underdog."

"Marian thought a great many fine things." He held his glasses up to the window. "A sociology that refuses to engage with policy leaves the field to economists and to vested interests who go unchecked by research. I would rather be in the room. I admired her enormously. I told her so."