title: Loitering With Intent: The Apprentice
author:  Peter O'Toole 
description: Amazingly, this second volume of Peter O'Toole's memoirs (the first was <a href="/exec/obidos/ISBN=0786881968/${0}">Loitering with Intent: The Child</a>, published in March 1995) covers only three years of the actor's life; even more amazingly, it's a wonderful read. If he hadn't been such a prodigiously gifted actor, O'Toole could have made it as a writer. His prose is discursive, freewheeling, multilayered, and fairly bursting with exuberant vitality. <b>Loitering with Intent: The Apprentice</b> covers O'Toole's years in the early 1950s at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he studied his craft, hobnobbed with fellow students (including Albert Finney, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship), and made rakish, footloose excursions around London. It's hard to say whether he had more fun in the living of it or the retelling, but both are a pleasure for the reader to behold.
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  # The Figure in the Carpet
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Henry James
  
  
  This page copyright © 2002 Munsey's.
  
  
  http://www.munseys.com
  
  CHAPTER I
  
  
  CHAPTER II
  
  
  CHAPTER III.
  
  
  CHAPTER IV.
  
  
  CHAPTER V.
  
  
  CHAPTER VI.
  
  
  CHAPTER VII.
  
  
  CHAPTER VIII.
  
  
  CHAPTER IX.
  
  
  CHAPTER X.
  
  
  CHAPTER XI.
  
  
  
  
  
  
      
  
  
  Transcribed from the 1916 Martin Secker edition by David Price, email
  
  
  ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### CHAPTER I
  
  
  
  
  
    
  I had done a few things and earned a few pence—I had perhaps
  
  
  even had time to begin to think I was finer than was perceived by the
  
  
  patronising; but when I take the little measure of my course (a fidgety
  
  
  habit, for it's none of the longest yet) I count my real start from the
  
  
  evening George Corvick, breathless and worried, came in to ask me a
  
  
  service. He had done more things than I, and earned more pence, though
  
  
  there were chances for cleverness I thought he sometimes missed. I
  
  
  could only however that evening declare