There was a moment in which, not touching the scar, he scrutinised it in silence. Then he switched off the light and sat again behind the desk. His eyes on the file before him, he said, 'And you waited thirty-four years to do something about it. Why now, Miss Gradwyn?'

There was a pause, then she said, 'Because I no longer have need of it.'

She thought, ... these are my people, the upper working class merging into the middle class, that amorphous unregarded group who fought the country's wars, paid their taxes, clung to what remained of their traditions. They had lived to see their simple patriotism derided, their morality despised, their savings devalued. They caused no trouble. ... If they protested that their cities had become alien, their children taught in overcrowded schools where ninety per cent of the children spoke no English, they were lectured about the cardinal sin of racism by those more expensively and comfortably circumstanced.

This new MMC -- Modernising Medical Careers -- makes training schemes far
more rigid. House men have become foundation-year doctors -- and we all know what a mess the government have made there -- senior house officers are out,
registrars are specialist surgical trainees, and God knows how long all this will last before they think of something else, more forms to fill in, more
bureaucracy, more interference with people trying to get on with their jobs.

Perhaps they popped him into a freezer and produced him nice and fresh on the appropriate day. That's the plot of a book by a detective novelist, Cyril Hare. I think it's called Untimely Death, but it may have been published originally under a different name.

Rhoda Gladwyn was interesting about apparently unconscious copying of phrases and ideas and the occasional curious coincidences in literature when a strong idea enters simultaneously into two minds as if its time has come.