ABSTRACT
Francis Stuart is a student of waiting. In Memorial (1973) he has his narrator, Fintan Sugrue, imagine himself being brought before the examiners in some lastday end of term examination in the Grand Aula. The examiners (one of them to be a woman, he notes) ask him on what subject he would wish to answer questions:
there would be only one on which to base a claim of a not totally wasted lifetime. I would say, with a certain quiet confidence: Set me a paper on waiting.1
