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Books: Fancy Footwork

DEBTS OF HONOUR

by Michael Foot

Harper & Row; 240 pages; $13.95

It is as if Tip O'Neill had published a series of erudite feuilletons on such figures as Hawthorne, Henry Adams and William Randolph Hearst; or Howard Baker had come out with a sheaf of witty commentaries on the likes of Whitman, Santayana and Bernard Baruch. Michael Foot is, after all, not a professional man of letters. He is a politician, the leader of Britain's Labor Party, and, as such, his country's shadow Prime Minister.

Such stateside equivalents are almost beyond imagination. On their...

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RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
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