A Matter of Principle
Sir Hamish Graham was bought up in the 1950s. He is an uncompromising scot who is honest and talented and hardworking but also extremely narrow minded and unadaptable and pompous. In the 1970s his Construction Company is not doing too well- when he is given a Mexican Contract.
He refuses to believe that an agent, called Victor Perez, is required to be appointed to whom 10% of the contract price must be paid and that this percentage is actually the Minister's cut. He visits the Minister and insists on knowing the full details and simply refuses to believe any version of the Minister, who tells him that Victor's father once, at great personal risk, saved an injured soldier, which was why the Government gives him the privileges of getting money from tenders. Later, when Graham does not understand, the Minister realizes that Sir Hamish is not a man who can do business the Mexican way and sends him out. In a twist ending, he is shown to be limping, revealing that he was the injured soldier.
Read more about this topic: A Quiver Full Of Arrows
Famous quotes containing the words matter and/or principle:
“Even today a crude sort of persecution is all that is required to create an honorable name for any sect, no matter how indifferent in itself.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world.... I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: “I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.””
—Primo Levi (1919–1987)