Quote Originally Posted by Burney View Post
Yes. I often suspected that he was one of these guys who's probably had the pïss taken out of him or been wound up so much over a lifetime that he often suspected people were having a go at him even when they weren't. I think this made him unpleasantly prickly and almost totally unable to take a joke.
I thought it was because he didn't speak-a the English so good. Anyway, so good as he needed to to make his points in writing, and that heightened his sensitivity and paranoia to acute status.