Non-Fiction

See also: Longer quotes from specific authors:

From The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin Books, 1967):

[Plato] enriched fantastic zoology with vast spherical animals and cast aspersions on those slow-witted astronomers who failed to understand that the circular course of heavenly bodies was entirely voluntary.
In Alexandria over five hundred years later, Origen, one of the Fathers of the Church, taught that the blessed would come back to life in the form of spheres and would enter rolling into heaven.
[p. 21-22]
In the midst of a wood, the hero comes upon a stone statue which seems to him an idol from some old Germanic temple. He touches it and the statue tells him he is Baldanders and thereupon takes the forms of a man, of an oak-tree, of a sow, of a fat sausage, of a field of clover, of a mulberry bush, of a silk tapestry, of many other things and beings, and then, once more, of a man. [...] Baldanders adds that his emblem (like that of the Turk, and with more right to it than the Turk) is the inconstant moon.
Baldanders is a successive monster, a monster in time. The title page of the first edition of [Hans Jakob Christoph Von] Grimmelshausen's novel [The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus / Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus, 1669] takes up the joke. It bears an engraving of a creature having a satyr's head, a human torso, the unfolded wings of a bird, and the tail of a fish, and which, with a goat's legs and vulture's claws, tramples a heap of masks that stand for the succession of shapes he has taken. In his belt he carries a sword and in his hands an open book showing pictures of a crown, a sailing boat, a goblet, a tower, a child, a pair of dice, a fool's cap with bells, and a piece of ordnance.
[p. 26-27 - Baldanders]
Chang Tzu tells us of a determined man who at the end of three thankless years mastered the art of slaying dragons, and for the rest of his days was not given a single chance to put his art into practice. [p. 43 - The Chinese Dragon]
The Eight-Forked Serpent of Koshi is prominent in the mythical cosmogony of Japan. It was eight-headed and eight-tailed; its eyes were as red as the winter cherry, and pine trees and mosses grew on its back, while firs sprouted on each of its heads. As it crawled, it stretched over eight valleys and eight hills, and its belly was always flecked with blood. In seven years this beast had devoured seven maidens, the daughters of a king, and in the eighth year was about to eat up the youngest daughter, named Princess-Comb-Ricefield. The Princess was saved by a god who bore the name of Brave-Swift-Impetuous-Male. This knight built a circular enclosure of wood with eight gates and eight platforms at each gate. On the platforms he set tubs of rice beer. The Eight-Forked Serpent came and, dipping a head into each of the tubs, gulped down the beer and was soon fast asleep. Then Brave-Swift-Impetuous-Male lopped the heads. A river of blood sprang from the necks. In the Serpent's tail a sword was found that to this day commands veneration in the Great Shrine of Atsuta. These events took place on the mountain formerly named Serpent-Mountain, and now called Eight-Cloud Mountain. The number eight in Japan is a magic number and stands for many, just as forty ("When forty winters shall besiege thy brow") did in Elizabethan England. Japanese paper currency still commemorates the killing of the serpent. [p. 55-56]
The Strong Toad is an imaginary animal different from other toads in that its back is covered with a shell like that of a turtle. This Toad glows in the dark like a firefly and is so tough that the only way to kill it is to reduce it to ashes. It owes its name to the great power of its stare, which it uses to attract or repel whatever is in its range. [A Chilean creature from Myths and Superstitions by Julio Vicuña Cifuentes] [p. 65]

From The hot seat : reflections on diplomacy from Stalin's death to the Bali bombings by Richard Woolcott:

The masterpieces of Islamic architecture in Bukhara and Samarkand are unforgettable. The glazes of the tiles, which have survived the blazing sun of Central Asia for centuries, are remarkable - especially the emerald greens and cobalt blues. They made me think of corals in the desert!
[Chapter 2, p. 15]
My Russian teacher in Moscow once said to me: "We say that in capitalist countries man exploits man. Here in the Soviet Union it's the other way round."
[Chapter 2, p. 21]
The high commissioner [in Pretoria?], Colonel Roy Hodgson, was one of the most colourful characters in the history of the department and working with him was an experience I would not have wanted to miss. He was an earthy, crusty, cigar-smoking, hard-drinking agnostic known to all as "Hoddy". He had been seriously wounded at Gallipoli in the First World War and had been posted as missing. When he hadn't appeared after six months he was listed as missing believed killed in action. In face he was in a Turkish hospital from which he emerged in 1917.
Hodgson was the only person I have ever known who carried in his wallet a cutting of his own obituary. He showed it to me once with the wry comment, "Perhaps I wasn't such a bad bastard after all."
[Chapter 3, p. 26]
Although I don't easily succumb to darshan, I was conscious that I met people who could influence policies and events and who I, in turn, might be able to influence. Darshan, as I learned from the late Professor Walter Crocker, a scholar who had been high commissioner in New Delhi, is an Indian expression for the beneficial glow derived from being in the presence of important persons. According to Crocker this may be sought after in Western societies but only the Indians are frank enough to endow it with a name.
[Chapter 4, p. 33]
[...] the question of Wilfred Burchett, an Australian journalist widely regarded as pro-communist [...] came to the fore. Burchett had lost his British passport in North Vietnam; it had been issued at a time when Australians travelling overseas used British passports. Burchett applied for an Australian passport from Canberra and our embassy was consulted on the matter.
Ambassador Waller and I discussed the arguments for and against the issue of an Australian passport to Burchett. Some of Burchett's critics in Australia were even calling for him to be tried for treason. I argued that, whatever his political attitude and notwithstanding what he had written as a war correspondent in Korea, he was Australian-born and entitled to hold the passport of the country of his birth. It was a citizenship issue, not a political issue. Given the anti-communist attitude of the Menzies Government, our strong support for American policies in Korea and Vietnam, and the fact that there was nothing to be gained from supporting Burchett's case, I was impressed when Keith Waller, as a matter of principle, agreed to recommend the issue of an Australian passport to Burchett. Predictably this application was rejected in Canberra. This did not surprise us but we believed we had done the correct thing.
[Chapter 5, p. 45]
An anecdote that did the rounds in Moscow in 1961 involved the arrest of a man running through the corridors of the Kremlin shouting: "Khrushchev is an idiot! Khrushchev is a madman!"
Some time later Khrushchev asked the attorney general what had happened to this person. The attorney general replied: "Nikita Sergeyevich, he was dealt with according to the law. He was sentenced to twelve years deprivation of liberty and he is now in Siberia."
Khrushchev looked concerned. "Comrade Attorney," he asked, "is this consistent with our less repressive, more open style of government since Stalin died?"
"It is consistent with Soviet law," the attorney general replied. "The man was sentenced to two years for disturbing the peace and ten years for revealing a state secret."
[Chapter 5, p. 50]
[...] This was the exotic city of childhood dreams, that crucible of African races, Africa's "back of beyond", its "end of the world", its symbol of remoteness and searing heat; the last outpost before human beings yielded to the unequal struggle with that vast Saharan sea of sand to the north.
But who wrote that the sacrifice of myth to reality is one of the misfortunes of travel? Despite my excitement I had something of this feeling on arriving in Timbuktu [in Mali]. So little was left of its illustrious past, so little to remind you that this was once a great cultural, trading and religious centre in the fifteenth century. Now it seemed a forgotten city, passive, decaying, burnt out by the relentless sun; a place on the edge of nowhere, where time stood still and the future vanished; the ultimate retreat.
The predominant colour was grey. There was a greyish quality about the sand. The houses were grey. Even the precious water carried by the Kabara canal from the Niger River was grey. There was grey dust in the air and grey dust on the leaves of the few stunted trees.
Timbuktu was quiet. There were no cars and even the footfalls of camels, donkeys and humans were softened by the sand. There were no real roads, just sand passages between the rows of secretive grey houses.
I climbed to the top of the main tower of the mosque of Djinguereber. Timbuktu was spread out before me in the morning sunlight, a maze of alleys and narrow streets of squat clay dwellings stretching away into the haze and the sand dunes. Beyond, there was nothing; nothing but sand and the salt mines of Taoudenit, twelve days into the desert by camel. Below me I noticed that the houses were constructed of handmade, oblong mudbricks, baked in the sun. Many homes had carved wooden doors with ornate locks of considerable beauty. The houses were usually square with flat roofs on which people slept during the hot summer nights.
At midday the houses seemed almost flattened into the sand by the blazing sun in a remarkable unity of sand, land, houses and haze, the dwellings blending into their surroundings so that architecture seemed to have lost its function. At night, however, under the moon and in the crisp air, Timbuktu was transformed into a city of exotic silver beauty and mystery.
The faces of the people reflected Timbuktu's colourful history; for centuries it was the melting pot, the place where the desert took over from tropical Africa, where peoples from the north and the south met and traded and fought and intermarried. You seem many pale, almost white, faces and many thin lips, aquiline noses and flashing teeth. Arabs, Moroccans, Touregs (natives of Mali), black Africans and Europeans have mingled their blood here.
Perhaps the most colourful sight in Timbuktu was the market, where the city became animated. Camels and donkeys, pottery and foodstuffs and local jewelery were traded. And grass! Not the marijuana variety but the grass that grew on the banks of the Niger River ten kilometres away and was a precious commodity in Timbuktu. It was carried to the town in boats made of small pieces of wood stitched together with bark strings, because the trees were too stunted to provide pieces of timber large enough to make boats in any other way.
I shall never forget Timbuktu, which remains a vivid and haunting memory. My only bad recollection is that, after I'd written and sent some forty postcards from this unique location, not one was received by its addressee.
[Chapter 8, p. 91-93]
We were towed into Accra by a genial Ghanaian behind his "mammy lorry", a ubiquitous but essential form of transport in West Africa, similar to the jeepney in the Philippines. The "lorries" had names, often philosophical, painted across their tailgates. This one read "Future is Uncertain". Sitting behind it for two hours, I thought it summed out the outlook for Africa's recently independent states.
[Chapter 8, p. 95]
On overseas trips I was also McMahon's chosen squash partner. I sometimes thought this was the main reason for my regular inclusion in his delegations. Billy McMahon was nuggety, aggressive and fit - a good player for his age. I found playing squash with him more difficult than advising on foreign policy or drafting speech notes! And I had to strike a fine balance. If I won too easily he would be angry and feel humiliated. If I lost by too large a margin he would feel triumphant.
Getting the right result was complicated in two ways. First, he had a curious method of scoring to his own advantage. Second, he would often run across me as I was playing a stroke. Naturally, I did everything, including not playing the shot and losing points to avoid hitting him. On two occasions, however, I did hit him when he suddenly leapt in front of me, too late for me to abort the stroke; once in New York and once in London. On the second occasion - a few hours before he was to appear on BBC television - I accidentally inflicted a nasty cut on the bridge of his nose. This was widely reported in the Australian media and the situation was compounded by the the humourist Alan Fitzgerald sending me a telegram that read: "Congratulations on second attack on PM. I hope the third attack is completely successful. Suggest you dump body in Channel."
Unfortunately, McMahon was an early riser and went through all the cables and papers in the delegation's office, and he read this telegram from Fitzgerald addressed to me. He was very angry and, although I said the telegram was simply a poor joke, he hardly spoke to me for two days.
[Chapter 9, p. 107-108]
[Some more quotes still to type up -- Fred]

From Walking on water: a life in the law by Chester Porter (Random House Australia, 2003):

[...] The tenant kept a pet carpet snake, which once went into the landlady's convenience to drink from the tank, its tail hanging down. The landlady enthroned herself, reached up for the chain and pulled down the carpet snake instead. This, the landlady claimed, was a nuisance and annoyance on the part of the tenant. It was, at least, light relief from the litany of alleged noisy parties and arguments that made up many nuisance and annoyance cases.
[p. 32]
I believed then, and I believe now, that a witness's evidence is best tested against the known facts and its inherent probability and consistency. As for demeanour, good demeanour is as likely as not to be a characteristic of a confidence trickster or a bent policeman. Bad demeanour is likely to be caused simply by nervousness or a wandering mind.
[p. 50-51]
Someone once said to me in my early days at the bar, "It is no use trying to protect the public. If you tie their hands they will hand the money over with their toes." Unfortunately, there is some truth in this.
In order to succeed for a plaintiff induced to lose money by fraud or misrepresentation, it is necessary to prove that he or she was in fact misled, and that the fraud or misrepresentation actually induced the contract. The problem was that if the plaintiff had been deceived, he or she was going to be a hopeless witness. If the plaintiff turned out to be shrewd and capable, how could one believe that he or she was deceived by the vendor? I have seen a lot of business victims fail in court because they were bad witnesses.
Many a working person tries to be the independent owner of a small business but fails, not merely because of inexperience, but because of deception by one of the many clever tricksters who seeks his or her money. The loss of entire savings can be a small tragedy for the plaintiff. I handled a lot of such cases and I lost quite a few. On the other hand, I often obtained settlements that eased the pain such losses caused.
[p. 56]
Protecting the public morals was a big issue in the 1960s and 1970s, and of course for many years before. There was the "Love me Sailor" case about an allegedly obscene novel soon after the war in which a vice squad detective's literary knowledge was tested by asking him if he knew William Shakespeare - he replied that he thought he was a New South Wales detective. [...]
[p. 56]
In recent years there has been a great agitation in the media for longer and tougher sentences. Victims of newsworthy crimes are asked whether the sentence imposed was enough and of course, according to them, it never is. People who drive home after quite a few drinks demand higher sentences for drunken drivers, until they are caught themselves. People who live dissolute and selfish sexual lives can nevertheless demand enormous sentences for sex offenders who infringe the criminal law. Of course, adultery and desertion of wife and children are not criminal offences, even though such conduct often causes much more harm in the long-term than many criminal offences.
There is so much hypocrisy about sentencing criminals. How many drivers have not committed the offence of driving above the limit for alcohol and causing deaths, only because they were lucky. How many people have "borrowed" money from various funds contrary to the criminal law, but have got it back in time, or have otherwise never been discovered? How many people have lost their tempers, but through good luck no serious injury resulted?
Instead of remembering Christ's admonition "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone", the voters of today are apparently prepared to cheer on the politicians who advocate tougher sentences, even mandatory sentences, to be imposed regardless of the circumstances. Some politicians even begrudge the prisoners having television in their cells, and describe barbaric prisons as "hotels".
Thus we build more and more brutal prisons which are highly successful as universities of crime, which ruin the lives of persons who are not dedicated criminals and which fail dismally as places of rehabilitation, and fail even more as the means of deterring or preventing crime.
Sex offenders are not infrequently the victims of extreme sentences, at times more than they would receive for murder. Such sentences obviously encourage such offenders to kill their victims to avoid detection.
I have often said that I stood between people and what they deserved. No one wants to receive their just deserts, but, of society's scoundrels, only those who happen to contravene the criminal law and get caught, get their just deserts at the hands of the law. In my opinion, they often receive punishments far beyond what they deserve. And the rest advocate more severe penalties.
What hypocrites we are, led by the nose by cynical politicians!
[p. 96-97]
In the late 1940s my friend Jack Lindsay agreed to his client, who had been charged with another offence, being lined up on a new charge. He was invited to inspect the line-up and agreed that there was reasonable similarity. The detective left the room to bring in the witness and Jack noticed a raincoat hung up on a peg just behind his client. Quietly he moved the raincoat a few pegs down behind another gentleman in the line-up. There is no prize for guessing whom the witness picked. Jack walked away with his client.
[p. 119]
When I had only been at the bar for about 10 years I was lucky enough to appear in the High Court instructed by the New Guinea Public Solicitor on appeals by leave from murder or manslaughter convictions in the New Guinea Supreme Court. In those days the only appeals were to the High Court by leave.
My first such case was Sirinjui - whose companion decided to throw four spears at the victim. Apparently for comity my client then threw a further four spears on the spur of the moment and not pursuant to any common purpose or pre-arrangement. This was the first of several appearances before the great Sir Owen Dixon who was very amused by my submissions that the appellant could not be charged with murder since his spears may well have been thrown at a corpse nor could he be charged with mutilating a corpse since the victim may have still been alive. Sir Owen cited a famous Harvard puzzle:
A man has two deadly enemies when he is about to make a trip across a desert. One poisoned his water in his water-bag, the other slashed the bag so that it leaked. The man died of thirst. Who, if anyone, was guilty of murder?
Ultimately Sirinjui was acquitted.
[p. 119-120]
When the death sentence applied to many offences, including simple theft and poaching, this hardly affected the level of crime. As Professor Radzinowicz pointed out back in the 1940s, the real deterrent is the likelihood of detection. A severe penalty hardly deters a person who believes he or she will never be caught.
[p. 236]
I believe that the post-Peter Ryan New South Wales Police Service is vastly improved from how it was before, in both honesty and efficiency. It was, however, a mistake to close small police stations. Friendly and frequent contact between the public and police is crucial to good policing. People should not be remote from the police. They should know them and want to help them.
Zero crime tolerance is bad policy. Tormenting the people for minor offences only makes them hostile to the police, who should be regarded as friends. Setting quotas for traffic police so that traffic patrols become revenue collections is very bad for public relations and honest policing.
[p. 261]
[...] I was appearing for a woman who should have been a wealthy widow but the estate was tied up by litigation and by the demands of the State for death duty. As a result, the woman was literally almost penniless. When I pointed this out to the presiding judge he simply replied that the executor had his executor's year to make arrangements. By law no one can sue the executor until he or she has had a year to sort things out. It was useless to point out that this trite comment on obvious law did not put food into the widow's mouth. In the equity and commercial courts the ghost of Jandyce v Jandyce, the never-ending suit in Dicken's Bleak House, still lurks among the corridors.
Meanwhile [in commercial cases], trolley after trolley of dubiously relevant documents are wheeled into court, lengthy affidavits are argued ad infinitum as to admissibility of evidence, applications for discovery and production of yet more documents proceed drearily from day to day, interspersed with lengthy written submissions by counsel. Eventually the case resolves itself into numerous issues and proceeds from week to week in cross-examination, legal objections, and so on. That costs per party can run into the millions is not surprising.
Even in that sort of litigation the case is as often decided as not decided on who is believed as to the conversations between the parties. It is, in fact, surprising how enormously important a few words can be between senior company officials. I can remember one recent case where tens of millions of dollars depended on a telephone conversation.
How does one decide the true facts in such a case? The persons speaking may or may not have made notes soon after. Contemporary notes are valuable, but often record the conversation as desired by the speaker, rather than as it actually occurred. This does not mean the notes are dishonest, but merely that people often have very faulty immediate recollections of what was said and tend to believe what they want to believe.
Of course there are the not-so-honest witnesses who doctor their notes or diaries. In once case I was faced with a business diary recording conversations very different from the account in my instructions. Normally such a diary would win the case for the opposition, but I was able to point to significant indications of concoction, and we won. It is actually quite difficult to concoct a business document in a foolproof fashion. I remember one client of mine, whose takings book for a shop had been concocted using the wrong year's calendar!
[p. 264-265]
Car accidents are often the source of litigation that is frequently decided by the evidence of an independent witness. I remember one case I had where I thought I was on a winner with the right-hand rule clearly in my client's favour. Yet unknown to me there was an independent witness working on a church roof at the intersection and he said my client was driving much too fast. He was a volunteer church worker, obviously honest, with a bird's-eye view of the accident. We lost, probably rightly so.
Yet many an independent witness is very unreliable. Most accidents happen in a flash and it is easy to get a false impression. Furthermore, it is human nature to garnish the story when one is the crucial witness who is going to decide the case.
Most judges grab for the independent witness as a means of solving their problem. But that witness may easily be a bent reed.
Some witnesses are just difficult. Doctors earn big money from accidents, but often resent being called to give evidence for injured plaintiffs. I learned long ago not to ask such a witness whether the plaintiff had suffered much pain. The answer would be that appropriate drugs had dealt with that problem. No, the proper course was to leave it to the defendant's counsel to suggest that the analgesics had substantially eliminated the pain. The doctor would vigorously reject the proposition and say that the plaintiff had suffered a great deal of pain. The witness had to contradict someone. So let it be counsel for the other side.
Quite a few witnesses try to be smart. What lawyer has not been bored witless at some social event by the layman who gave evidence in a case (only one, thank goodness) and confounded the cross-examining counsel. As an advocate, I quite frequently let such witnesses take charge of the proceedings and dominate me. In no time they would say something extraordinarily stupid and they were able to destroy their own evidence.
To return to demeanour, how does demeanour help in deciding between an ugly man and a pretty girl? I lost faith in the accuracy of legal fact-finders some years ago and one case which helped to clear my thoughts was between my client, a very ugly man, and a pretty socialite woman for whom he had done some contract work in her luxury home. The contract was verbal. The case depended on who was believed as to the terms of a conversation. It was obvious that my client had no chance, none whatsoever, not because he was a liar or a fool, but because he was ugly and spoke with a thick accent and his opponent was a pretty socialite woman.
Some time later I appeared again before another judge in a motor accident case. He was noted for always finding for the plaintiff, but this time he found for my client, the defendant, a pretty girl from a leading socialite family. It was not due to any skill on my part.
[p. 270-271]
The big problem of the criminal courts is how to do justice in what we called the one-on-one cases; that is, where there is only one witness against the accused. This happens frequently, often in situations where the surrounding circumstances give little guide as to who is telling the truth. The problem has always been there: for example, a person claiming that the accused in a denied conversation deceived him or her by a false pretense through which he or she lost money, or a person who claims that the accused assaulted him or her. Who really struck the first blow? The problem reaches its extreme form when a child accuses an adult of sexual abuse.
A necessary reform is the better investigation of these offences. Police and doctors should not simply presume guilt. They should make a detailed inquiry as to where the truth lies. In my experience as a barrister this did not occur. In particular, police arrested people without even asking them to reply to the charges against them. If they had carefully investigated the statements of the accused some cases would never have proceeded. In others the court would have a much better background of surrounding facts in which to decide between the accuser and the accused and investigated the case more thoroughly.
Under existing law the judge directing the jury in such a case should direct the jury that where the Crown case depends on one witness, the evidence of that witness should be scrutinised with care. That is only common sense but does not draw the jury's attention to the fact that where the Crown case depends on one witness only, who is not corroborated with other evidence, then there is a real danger of miscarriage of justice unless very special care and scrutiny is exercised by the jury.
The fact is that numerous sexual-assault cases, and for that matter other one-on-one criminal cases, involve a special danger of jury error. If we are honest with ourselves we have to admit that many jury errors occur in all types of criminal cases. In holding that the death penalty involved an "undue risk of executing innocent people" (Sydney Morning Herald, 3 July 2002) Judge Rakoff in the US District Court for New York said, "What DNA testing has proved, beyond cavil, is the remarkable degree of fallibility in the basic fact-finding processes on which we rely in criminal cases." United States death-row convictions investigations have already revealed over 100 wrongful convictions.
We flatter ourselves if we think our courts do that much better in this regard than those in the United States.
How can we improve this? The best reform is of police practice. At present the police find a suspect and then target him or her. If they could be persuaded to search for the truth rather than evidence against the target, many injustices would be avoided. Not only would fewer innocent people be convicted, but if the defences of suspects were impartially investigated before trial and preferably before arrest, false defences would be more likely to fail.
Many times juries retire to consider their verdicts when the decision could go either way. How often are they wrong? For years this has worried me. I have been quite unable to assume, as some judges do, that accused persons are almost always guilty. I know that there must be many innocent people who are convicted. How many, it is hard to say. In one-to-one accusations of sexual assault there must be many errors, since we do not have anything like a reliable system of fact-finding.
The fact-finding side of the law needs much more research and study. In the past the great minds of the law have concerned themselves with esoteric points of law. The law journals have rarely dealt with fact-finding, and the appeal courts usually avoid it by saying that the trial judge had the "inestimable advantage" of seeing and hearing the witnesses. But I believe things are changing.
It is obviously desirable that there should be public confidence in the courts. However, maintaining public confidence should not result in pretending that problems do not exist.
The problems of fact-finding also exist in the civil courts. Often the presence of documents guides the decision but there are many cases of one-on-one witnesses with little else to assist the court. In these cases, proof only has to be on the balance of probabilities so that a defendant can incur heavy damages on slight evidence.
The problem about being a busy practitioner is that one has little time for thought about the wider problems of the law. I found that as a barrister my thoughts were preoccupied by the problems of my clients. Now that I have retired I appreciate more and more that the real problems are not the law itself, but the ways in which the law is enforced.
Quite frequently I read about how misconduct, even criminal conduct, is not exposed because those who know the truth fear being sued for libel. This particularly occurs in company affairs. Sometimes in practice I had to advise auditors who feared to do their duty by making appropriate criticisms lest they be sued. It was not a foolish fear. Being sued for defamation can ruin an ordinary person and can result in the loss of his or her home to pay damages and costs, particularly the latter. The threat by a wealthy man to sue an ordinary person is no empty one. It is a brave person who defies that threat.
Defamation has become technical. It was always expensive; now it is much more so. The purse of an ordinary person will be emptied long before the case comes on for hearing. This will be the result of endless interlocutory (or preliminary) proceedings which seem to grow up like Hydra heads in defamation proceedings. Pleadings - that is, the filed statement of the case - will be challenged and argued over, further particulars will be sought and argued over, discovery of documents is quite likely, and so one.
When the case comes on at last, there are arguments and findings about what the allegedly defamatory words really mean, and then at last (in a different hearing) there will be an argument about defences.
The auditors doing their job will have a defence of qualified privilege because they were only doing their duty. However an auditor cannot act maliciously. Malice will destroy the privilege. But an angry exchange of words during the audit might be evidence of malice. Of course, truth will be a defence, but often what is well known and certainly true is hard to prove in a court of law.
If an auditor finds that a rich director has been dishonest, he has a duty to expose the director, but the auditor may well be at risk.
In local government, a mayor or councillor who has been involved in shady deals may well intimidate the other councillors by threats to sue for defamation. Such stories are not infrequent in the local papers.
I am sure that the Watergate exposure of President Nixon would not have occurred in Australia because of our defamation laws. Reform is constantly advocated but difficult to achieve. The need to protect reputations is to be weighed against the need to expose evil. One partial answer is along the lines of American law which permits bona fide criticism and "exposure" of public figures even if it is erroneous. In America, unlike Australia, public figures cannot easily recover big windfalls of damages if they are lucky enough to be defamed although recent Australian decisions have improved this situation.
The defamation problem is closely related to the general problem of expense in litigation. This is particularly apparent in commercial litigation. The smaller individual or company has no way of litigating against wealthy and ruthless companies and cartels.
The unfortunate fact is that court procedures are now very detailed, complicated and expensive, which obviously favours the wealthy. When I started at the bar procedures were much simpler. Interlocutory proceedings were short, if they occurred at all. Cases were also much shorter. Since everything had to be typed, if it was to be copied, only relevant documents were in the brief. One did not even see binders. The hearings were for days rather than weeks or months. There were no computers to dig up reports of cases which were probably best forgotten. Written submissions were almost unknown. [...]
[p. 294-297]
Corporation or company law is by necessity complicated but the fairly recent federal laws are far too difficult for almost anyone but a specialist lawyer to follow. This is quite wrong if ordinary individuals are to carry on business under company structures. Much needs to be done to simplify these laws but I fear that again no one is trying.
One great reform I have seen in my time in the law has been the abolition of death duty, the State tax on deceased estates and estate duty, the federal tax in such cases. The State death-duties authorities in New South Wales, in my experience, wielded their powers ruthlessly and unhumanely. For example, nothing could be spent, even on supporting the widow and children of the deceased person until death duty had been assessed and paid. In a complicated estate this might take years. In a simple case it took months. Those who remember will never agree to such a tax again.
Estate duty was a charge on the estate and its imposition was administered with more common sense. However, both forms of duty were avoided by the wealthy, with the aid of clever lawyers. Middle- and lower-income families often suffered real hardship.
We are still left with the task of imposing fair taxation. The Income Tax Act is far from fair. The wealthy still avoid its provisions by highly skilled legal advice. The middle- and lower-income earners pay for the wealthy. This injustice has not been solved, partly because the problem is difficult, but mainly because the wealthy wield great political power.
So a waiter who works two jobs and fails to declare one is likely to be caught and punished. The tycoon who avoids tax on millions of dollars has little to fear. The waiter evades tax because what he does is illegal. The tycoon avoids tax because, thanks to the well-paid efforts of his lawyers, he is acting in some elaborate scheme that is within the law. Thus the great gap between rich and poor is aggravated even more. This gap is, in my opinion, one of the greatest problems of our age, and we ignore it at our peril.
However, we should appreciate that economic reforms did at least, at first, produce great wealth, spread throughout Australian society. If things seem to be in need of urgent reform now, it may be that the law will have to interfere, perhaps in new types of laws which we have not seen before.
When I started in the law I was taught to admire the law rather uncritically. Then I started to see its faults only too clearly, and then I appreciated the problems.
I think that great progress has been made over the last half-century but we cannot be complacent. There are many more problems for the law to try to solve.
[p. 302-303]

From Rescuing the Spectacled Bear by Stephen Fry (Random House, 2002):

The words "We are from OR Media, a small independent production company based in Chiswick" do not carry quite the same weight around the world as "We are from the BBC". Mind you, this is a double-edged sword. To say "We are from the BBC" is also to say, so far as officials and minor functionaries the world over are concerned, "Please hold us upside down and help yourself to the endless money that pours from our bloated western pockets". It is very hard to persuade anybody that the BBC's fame is more or less in inverse proportion to its budgetary largesse. Not that we are complaining.
[Chapter 1, p. 18-19]
Perhaps the ultimate question for anyone concerned with The Environment and all that it entails is this: how rich does a country have to be before it starts to spend money on its ecological well-being? We can all rehearse the argument that ecological and economical well-being are interdependent, but anyone save an unimaginative fanatic will accept that until there is an abundance of food on the human table, the bird table is going to remain bare.
[Chapter 1, p. 23]
The Spectacled Bear, tremarctos ornatus of the family Ursidae, is the only bear native to South America. They are officially classed as carnivores, but this is a confusing taxonomical anomaly that says more about zoologists than bears, since they are almost exclusively eaters of fruits, cereals, succulents, cacti and bromeliads (spiny fruity plants like the pineapple). Because they will also munch on an ant from time to time they are described as meat eaters. Devourers of flesh who also nibble the odd blade of grass do not classified as herbivores, but that is something for biologists to explain.
[Chapter 1, p. 27-28]
[On Nick Green, the Producer] I have already told you something about the human dynamo Nick Green. He looks like a teenage mantinée idol, talks like a man who has been told his vocal cords have only a week left to live and remains cheerful in the face of setbacks which would have Pollyanna throwing furniture and sobbing with frustration. [...] If it sounds like I am hero-worshipping Nick, then I probably am.
[Chapter 1, p. 33-34]
In the meantime, my size presenting just as much a challenge to the off-the-peg gent's outfitters of the town, a tailor visited my room. I am sorry to say that he combines the worst kind of halitosis with an even fouler style of body odour, resulting in a combination which hangs about the room hours after he has gone. I know this sounds unlikely but it is absolutely true. The stench would seem to penetrate the curtains, the fabric of the furniture, the wallpaper, everything. Even with the windows open and the air-conditioning blasting out its highest setting the miasma refuses to clear. There's a well-known British actress whose name I shall naturally keep to myself who is famous for the pungent horror of her body odour. It is so terrible that dressers on film, theatre and television have to be paid extra to work with her. I promise I'm not making this up. She did a TV drama not long ago and the costume hire company burned all the clothes when they were returned. After three boil washes they still stank to hell. She's exceptionally nice and no one has told her, which I suppose is right. How can you break such news to someone, even kindly?
[Chapter 2, p. 42-43]
Location filming however comes down to two essentials even more crucial than sleep: Bowels and laundry. I have no doubt I will have more to say on those luminous topics as the three weeks unwind.
[Chapter 2, p. 44]
This is the kind of diarrhoea that you read about in horror novels. I have tried to start today's entry three times, but on each occasion have been forced to my luxurious bathroom to do far from luxurious things. It's my own fault, naturally. First of all I shouldn't have discoursed with such blithe authority on the subject of bowels and laundry. Such hubris was bound to result in something appalling.
[Chapter 3, p. 49]
[...] the two deepest canyons on earth are in Peru - over twice the depth of the Grand Canyon [...]
[Chapter 3, p. 50-51]
The bed was made for me last week when word arrived that I was a giant. When I say the bed was made, I don't mean that sheets were put upon it. I mean the bed was made. Manufactured. Actually made. This is very touching but I am beginning to tire of the message that Peru sends out to me. You Are A Freak, Señor Free, as they like to call me.
[Chapter 4, p. 63]
Until you have seen (and heard) me attempting to mount and dismount a hammock your life has been nothing but a rehearsal. Think of a hippopotamus trying to ascend a rope ladder and you'll have a reasonably accurate picture.
[Chapter 4, p. 64]
At three twenty-three in the afternoon a mighty earthquake ripped the town in two. The event lasted an appalling 90 seconds and registered 7.9 on the Richter Scale. It did much damage to many other towns along the valley. Fate had something quite immensely terrible in mind for Yungay however. The force of the tremors caused a section of glacier at the side of el pico norte to dislodge itself. It moved down the mountain side, gathering incredible speed and millions of tons of rock and ice as it cascaded. Within three minutes, from start to finish, the avalanche had travelled thirty kilometres until it came to rest. It came to rest on the flat valley floor. It came to rest on the town of Yungay. The town was no more. All that was left was a flat, lifeless inland beach of ice and rubble. In all, eighty thousand people lost their lives: more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. [Only if you don't count later deaths from radiation poisoning -- Fred] There were survivors. Ninety-two people scrambled to the highest point in the town, the cemetery of all places. Even more fortunately, 394 children were visiting a circus in a nearby village.
[Chapter 4, p. 67-68]
Monkeys, I think, are animals of which one can tire very quickly on a social level. Entertaining as they at first appear and comely as they unquestionably remain, in fur and form, there is about their features a malevolent glare, a greed and a message of selfishness that puts one in mind of dreadfully spoilt infants. There is a message in their faces that admits no possibility of affection on their part. They get attached to people, and scratch those who come close to their favourites, but you always sense that it comes from egotism not devotion. In our world, that is: that's why they make appalling pets. In their own world they are magnificent. [...] I suppose if you run a lodge in the middle of the jungle tame parrots and monkeys are more or less de rigueur. It worked on me: and to call them tame was to insult them. They were wild but chose to live hard by the lodge.
[Chapter 13, p. 146-147]
Everything at the lodge is simple and wooden. Except the phone lines and air conditioning, which don't exist.
[Chapter 13, p. 147]
By oil-lamp light I sprayed myself and the mosquito netting with about a gallon of anti-mozzie juice and climbed into bed, carefully tucking the net back under the mattress. A moth about the size and weight of the Penguin Classics edition of Don Quixote flapped in and started circling the tilley lamp. First mistake. Swearing lightly, I pushed myself out of the netting and took the lamp out onto the porch. Creatures of the night, being dark and stupid, are attracted to the light. THEN WHY THE HELL DON'T THEY COME OUT DURING THE DAY?
Never mind: like a groom flicking confetti from his hair on the honeymoon night, I brushed a dozen assorted horrors of the insect world from my sweaty locks and repeated the mozzie netting business.
I think the noise had only dimly been on my mind before this point. I had been concentrating too much on avoiding cockroaches underfoot and folding clothes away high and out of tarantula reach (yes there really are tarantulas here) for the sound to make much of an impression. Now that I was alone and nudely panting in my mosquito tent crushed by the deep black of the night, the astonishing sound of the night began to make themselves known to me.
In the manner of Cole Porter's "Now You Has Jazz": the sounds of the jungle night are composed this: first you take a snare drum a thousand feet in diameter and upon it you place a million steel wing-nuts. You put the whole contrivance on a giant pulsing vibrator of some kind. This is your basic background, a kind of rhythmic snare buzzing, but on a titanic scale. Cicadas I suppose, but who can tell? I can't honestly believe the scraping of a few little insect legs could possibly cause so enormous and all-encompassing a sound. It is all around you and never lets up for one second. At six o'clock, the man from the seventies dinner-party who always set the table on a roar with his trimphone impression will butt in from time to time with his entertaining chirrup. Fourteen or fifteen people closer to you, sometimes alarmingly close, idly run the back of their thumbnails along a comb for no reason. A whoop appears out of nowhere and, once started, is repeated with the same insistent monotony as the "Barmy Army!" chant of the England cricket groupies. Some one or thing, possibly related to the trimphone impersonator, suddenly starts doing a water droplet impression: a kind of echoey 'prip'. If there isn't already a species of bird or possibly frog called The Bren Gun, then I've discovered one, for that starts up too, rat-tat-tatting at first to the left and then to the right of you. It's all getting a little worrying.
But, as the sweat spirals around your neck and you feel your pupils dilate enough to see, or imagine that they see, quite horrid shapes and sights at the window, the brain slowly accustoms itself to this great screen of sound: for it is rhythmic and sleep seems a possibility. That's when a blood-curdling scream as of a young girl having her hair pulled by an ogre suddenly explodes so close to you that you leap from your bed shouting in fear.
What the hell was that?
It must have been in the room with you. Even if it's only a money or a lorikeet it's too much, far too much to bear. You shout louder and smack your sodden pillow in a way that wouldn't frighten a dove, but what else can you do? Run from your room into the night?
Somehow you settle again. And this time a creature speaks, calmly and with great assurance.
"Parsimony."
You hear it quite clearly and now you know you have gone mad. Parsimony? Why would a jungle creature speak English? And if he did, why would he say "parsimony"? It makes no sense. No sense at all. But it was so clear and so nakedly forthright that the ghost of the word seems to stand out in the night like the aural equivalent of a retinal after-image.
You're miles from mummy and there are screaming things and buzzing things and flapping things and things that say "parsimony". And, now - dear God - and now there's something scratching at the door.
It's stopped scratching and now it's slithering around the corner.
There's only one thing to do. Why didn't you think of it before?
You get out of bet once more, stamping hard on the ground and whistling to show the whole alien horrible jungle that you don't care a bit, and you reach into your sponge bag pulling out twice the recommended dose of Zopiclone sleeping tablets.
They take about twenty minutes to kick in. Twenty minute of howling and buzzing and plucking and scratching and screeching and laughing and repeated assurances of parsimony but in the end you're in a place where you don't care what threatens or mocks or torments or bites you, nor what might slither or crawl over you and when you wake up it's a shining day full of bright parrots and green fronds and dappled light and wonderful, miraculous jungle smells that fill you with a heavenly and unabashed joy.
[Chapter 13, p. 151-154]
It was also pouring with rain, the first rain we've had and the prospect of doing all our filming with John's camera wrapped in a high tech bin liner (NB: Only use Sony approved bin-liners. We cannot otherwise guarantee the proper functioning of your camera) and myself under an umbrella was not appealing.
[Chapter 16, p. 178]
Every now and again we stopped to let a scheduled train pass by. The local reaction to a bear gliding serenely past on the back of a train was something to behold.
Children ran to try and keep up. [...]
I remember a series in my childhood on the BBC called, I think, Great Railway Journeys of the World in which Paul Theroux or similar would cross India or Siberia on a train. I don't recall a Peruvian railway being filmed, Perurail didn't exist then of course, but there is no question that Cusco to Aguas Calientes is just about the most wonderful journey you can take on the planet. The gorges, peaks, and (at this time of year) the tumbling, spouting, splurging and quite terrifying fast and frisky Urubamba river have a surprise at every corner. I can do no better than to quote Matthew Parris on Peruvian countryside, from his classic, Inca-Kola:
... a sense of something no English landscape can inspire. It is the feeling that what lies within vision is only just the beginning of what waits beyond.
What waited beyond for us, of course, was the town of Agaus Calientes. If Machu Picchu is the crown on the top of Peru's head, it's a shame that just about the only way to reach it is by way of Peru's arsehole. For I'm afraid that's what Aguas Calientes is. It takes its name from the hot springs close by and is a shambolic collection of hideous buildings thrown up with no thought or consideration for the Eight Wonder of the World above it. INRENA won't let the Machu Picchu Sanctuary Hotel fit a water purifier with a year-long wait for permits, but it will allow any citizen of [Agaus Calientes] to despoil one of the world's most wonderful places. (Polly, our stillsman Rob Fraser's partner, aptly calls INRENA the institute for national perks.) The citizens fight the plans for a cable car which would be one of the most sensational and beautiful experiences imaginable, because they fear for the monopoly the hold on bus-rides up the mountain. The whole place should be bulldozed and a town of which Peru can be proud should be put there in its place.
[Chapter 16, p. 179-181]

From Still Spitting at Sixty by Roger Law (HarperCollins, London 2005):

[Peter Fluck] was an absolute ace at lettering, with virtually no formal training. I used to ascribe this skill to the frequency with which he had to repaint the 'L' in the sign over his father's shop in Park Street. [Chapter 3, University Challenged, p. 27]
[...] there was never a lot of point in knowing [David] Frost if you already knew [Peter] Cook because he would retell all Cook's jokes. Cook called him 'the bubonic plagiarist'. [Chapter 3, University Challenged, p. 33]
[...] Eventually Fluck and I discovered that we could make more serious money by doing the early-morning cleaning at Fitzwilliam House and by waiting at table for the undergraduates at Trinity, where we became celebrated as the 'Gypsy Menace'. It was therefore not very long before self-service catering was introduced. [Chapter 3, University Challenged, p. 33]
I can remember one raid on a Labour Party conference quite vividly as it was the time we made the stew. There were twelve of us going in Fletcher's van and as nobody seemed to have any money I had the bright idea of filling a milk churn with a gigantic stew of cabbage and pigs' trotters that would sustain us through a week's agitation. There was no problem locating a milk churn, but the process of cooking the stew and decanting it by stages into the churn proved incredibly lengthy - so lengthy, in fact, that by the time the last pigs' trotters had gone in at the top those at the bottom had gone off, infecting the whole brew. We then had the problem of burying eighty pints of pigs' trotter stew in a Cambridge garden. This was done under cover of night, and to the best of my knowledge the stew remains buried there to this day. At some future date, no doubt, it will make a most interesting archaeological find. [Chapter 3, University Challenged, p. 35-36]
Though relatively small in circulation, [the magazine Queen] was an advertising Klondike with a readership once described as "the fresh upper crust - crumbs held together with a lot of dough". But between the glossy motoring ads it managed to insert some very good journalism. [Chapter 4, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Yob, p. 40]
Ed Middleditch, one of my tutors at the Cambridge school, had urged me to go on to the Royal College of Art. Middleditch was a strange, tortured man of the post-war Kitchen Sink school of painters. At college he had me drawing galvanized tin buckets against a white background for what seemed like decades. Never party to the fashionable enthusiasms, Middleditch tried to impress upon me the need for a high seriousness in my approach to art. [...] A couple of years later I saw an exhibition by Middleditch at the Beaux Arts gallery - powerful charcoal drawings of the wild mountain landscapes of Grazalema in southern Spain. It was the only time an exhibition of drawings moved me to tears, and rather belatedly I got the point. [Chapter 4, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Yob, p. 41-42]
The most significant political event during my time at the Observer was the election in 1964 of a new Labour government. This was a body blow for satire, which had gorged itself on the Profumo Affair and Tory decline. There was a feeling, even on the far left, that with a new dawn of political wisdom satire would no longer be necessary. I did not share the opinion on this point, because there was something that troubled me about Harold Wilson. I couldn't help it. I just didn't like his face. In those days I thought it possible that I was being unfair, but I later discovered a powerful precedent for this form of political analysis. While the American Civil War was raging, Abraham Lincoln rejected an excellently qualified ministerial candidate on the grounds that he did not like his face. When reproved by his aides for vetoing an appointment on such flimsy grounds, Lincoln observed: "Every man over forty is responsible for his own face." [Chapter 5, The Sixties, p. 56-57]
[...] I would get to do the news drawings for things like [...] big courtroom scenes, where cameramen were not allowed to take pictures. As it happens, drawing was not allowed either, but you could make a fair stab at it by going along and making a few doodles in your pocket and doing the composition from memory later. [Chapter 5, The Sixties, p. 58]
[David] King was just 22, a year younger than myself, and unusual in a number of respects. He had an unnerving cackling laugh and spoke with a wheezy Cockney intonation that suggested three lifetimes spent on sixty gaspers a day. Strangers would invariably find him disconcerting. Once, when King was hospitalized after a serious car accident, a doctor told his wife, Philomena, that she should brace herself for a shock when seeing him as it was unlikely that he would ever be the same man again. After seeing her husband, Mrs King was able to comfort the doctor with the reassurance that her husband had always been like that. [Chapter 5, The Sixties, p. 59]
At night I would retreat to a cockroach-infested hold in the wall on the Lower East Side. At that stage I was trying to save every penny to bring my family over. This made me a rock-hard touch for the unfortunate Bowery bums along my route home, though I would feel compelled to shell out for one who shuffled towards me with the immortal line, "Have you got fifteen dollars for my ballet lessons?" [Chapter 6, Stars and Bars, p. 78]
Under the patronage of Alastair Burnet, the editor of the Economist, [Peter Fluck] had been able to exhibit a series of political specimens on the magazine's front cover. His study of Harold Wilson had been so evil-looking that Michael Heseltine offered to buy it. [Chapter 7, The Cosmic Couch, p. 86]
I met a more ominous species of nutter in Winnfield, Louisiana, the home town of Huey Long, the South's most notorious political son. "How long you bin in this country, boy?" the sheriff asked me. Two months, I confessed. "Goddam," he said. "You speak pretty good American." By day there was almost tangible racial tension about the place, but by ten o'clock in the evening it was asleep, not unlike Littleport in that respect. A local reporter asked me what I thought about the place, obviously wanting me to drop myself in it with some smart-ass liberal remark, but I spoke the simple truth. I said it reminded me of home. [Chapter 7, The Cosmic Couch, p. 90]
[...] My task was only vaguely defined but it appeared that my main duty would be to act as a back-up witness to [Colin Simpson's] investigations, while taking a few photographs as reference for the colour drawings I was to prepare. Our mission was to look into the affairs of a shady bank in Morocco, and we met by prior arrangement in Gibraltar.
My first surprise in Gibraltar was the discovery of another back-up witness, Simpson's pretty young bride of very recent vintage. So we were honeymooning and investigating at the same time. Stealth was apparently of the essence, so the approach to Morocco was made in a small boat of dubious seaworthiness which Simpson had hired at the quayside. Within twenty minutes of setting foot on Moroccan soul we were all under arrest.
Simpson remonstrated with the cops in his best British gunboat commander style, but they were unmoved. It appeared that coastguards have given them concrete intelligence of the arrival of a smuggler's vessel with a description of the three people on board that fitted us perfectly - one white man, one white woman and one Japanese sumo wrestler. After Simpson had been allowed to make a number of furious phone calls, which must have alerted the rest of North Africa to the arrival of an undercover investigative team, the police started to relent. And when the boat proved to be 'clean' it was convivial mint teas all round.
[Chapter 7, The Cosmic Couch, p. 90]
Though [Murray] Sayle was one of the best writing journalists on on the paper [The Sunday Times], he never, unlike some lesser writers, implied that there was any great mystique about his activity. The only qualities necessary for a journalist were, he said, "rat-like cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability". [Chapter 7, The Cosmic Couch, p. 93]
People who once worked for the Sunday Times almost invariably have their own personal idea of when the rot set in and things changed inexorably for the worse. A popular date for whingers of this type is 1983 [...] More popular still is 1981, when Rupert Murdoch took over as proprietor and began to stamp his unique imprint on the organization. [...] I personally, however, would date my own whinge even earlier, to late 1974 when the advertising and marketing department first seriously got their grappling hooks into the magazine.
[...] The way ahead, the advertising people thought, was to make the magazine more consumer-oriented, essentially making the editorial content serve their perceptions of the needs of the market. Magnus Linklater, to his credit, thought this was a lousy idea, and said so. Within a few months he was summarily relieved of his command, and replaced by Hunter Davies who took to the journalism of how to mow your lawn, how to buy your car and how to brush your dog's teeth, like a duck to water.
[...] Years later I bumped into Davies at a magazine reunion bash where he remarked that I'd done so well in television that perhaps I should thank him for firing me from the magazine. I might have done, if he had acted so decisively. But the truth was that he simply bored me slowly out of the building.
[Chapter 8, Luck and Flaw, p. 96-99]
Fluck and I settled down in the chapel, producing models at a steady clip of forty a year, about three of which we thought were reasonably good. Like all couples forced into extreme intimacy, we became odd, with our own individual, curmudgeonly ways. Fluck would disguise his envy of my ability as a salesman of grotesque ideas by saying that I only got orders by threatening to kill people, which was largely untrue. I would mask my resentment of Fluck's superior ingenuity by saying that the only reason he thought laterally was because he was too lazy to think like any normal human being, which was largely true.
When some crucial deadline approached, I used to watch Fluck out of the corner of my eye with appalled fascination. He would drop some vital tool off the bench, but instead of stooping and picking it up like any sane person, he would set to work making a replacement tool from the odds and sods on the bench. If I dared to say anything, he would fudge the issue with a crafty remark like, "It's too hot to bend down." As a matter of fact, during the summer months it was too hot in all positions. We had no end of experts coming to counsel us on how to improve ventilation in the chapel, but the best advice, admittedly given by a very highly qualified architect, was that we should wear kaftans.
[Chapter 8, Luck and Flaw, p. 101-102]
I liked teaching because there is nearly always something you can pass on, perhaps not so much a skill but something more like a set of connections. All illustration has its family tree, and if you know about the tree you can introduce young people to branches of it that might engage their interest or, better still, enthusiasm. [...] I think I managed it to some extent at Hornsey, but perhaps not quite so well at the Central School, to which I ill-advisedly transferred. The fault was not in the students, but in some of the staff, who seemed to me to be absurdly pretentious.
[...] My counter-argument was that teaching students how to get paid for expressing their real selves might in the long run, even at the risk of self-indulgence, prove to be more advantageous to them than crabbed exercises in producing useful diagrams of how to load your camera, and suchlike - and in the short run it was certainly a lot less boring. He [the head of department] was not convinced. I taught there against the prevailing ethos for a while until the moment when I had to leave came to me with extreme clarity. A young student there showed me four sheets of artwork in colour, all based on household objects. The presentation was quite stunning, and I heard myself saying, "These are absolutely beautiful. You really should go to art school."
[Chapter 8, Luck and Flaw, p. 104-105]
[...] To prevent [the models] smashing each other to pieces on the journey [to be photographed] we used to have to cement them to the steel floor of the vehicle with lumps of hot plasticine. I used to brew up the old plasticine and hurl great gobs of it down from the upper level of the chapel onto Fluck as he stood by the car below. And Fluck would leap up and down with rage, not having my keen sense of humour. [Chapter 8, Luck and Flaw, p. 106-107]
The Sunday Times business, in any event, tended to be on the cautious side after Rupert Murdoch became its proprietor. I do not think the new owner's satiric instinct extended much beyond the appointment of new editors [...] [Chapter 8, Luck and Flaw, p. 108]
[...] Deirdre was able to pursue her interest in patchwork and quilting [...] Among the overseas places that sought her advice was Soweto in South Africa, and she visited the township on a couple of occasions. I can remember a return match when the ladies of Soweto came to visit us in Orchard Street. It was well known that Soweto was the worst slum in Africa. Less well known was the fact that it also contained an awesome, house-proud bourgeoisie, and I could tell from the horrified expressions of the contingent of black ladies in our dishevelled living room that our housekeeping was well below the standards to which they were accustomed. [Chapter 8, Luck and Flaw, p. 109]
When making caricatures, or indeed anything else, it is possible to get too close to your own work. We might think something was funny, but this was not always the best guide to how a caricature might be viewed by the outside world. Whenever we finished one we would call in our Sudanese milkman for his expert opinion. He took the task most seriously, and saved us on several occasions. [Chapter 8, Luck and Flaw, p. 109]
[...] On publication, another journalist asked, "Don't you think bringing out an illustrated Christmas Carol for the Christmas market a little meretricious of you?" to which Fluck replied "And a meretriciousmas to you too."
I have another Christmas Carol story which nobody believes but which I'm obliged to relate on account of its being true. In the quest for an American publisher for the book I flew to New York, where indifference reigned. I couldn't find a single published even ready to discuss the book, let alone buy it. Looking around the bookshops I happened to notice that many of the prime best-sellers were books about how to cook chicken. I then re-rang a select hit-list of publishers to say that I had a book for sale called Chicken Dishes of the World, which had lavish illustrations. This led to almost instant appointments with a range of top commissioning editors.
Oddly enough, none of them expressed any great surprise on finding out that I was selling Dickens, not chickens. In London I would probably have been promptly shown the door, but in New York there seems to be a presumption that anyone inventive enough to trick their way in might, conceivably, also have something worthwhile to offer.
[Chapter 8, Luck and Flaw, p. 113-114]
Despite the huge success of the Muppets we were by no means convinced that this approach was entirely right for us. I remember going to a lecture by [Jim] Henson in which he explained that the Muppets were successful precisely because they were not people. With Kermit, a piece of green rag with two ping-pong balls for eyes, there were no problems of credibility. Kermit could get away with it, even to the extent of telling a TV interviewer that the secret of his success was "Not blinking". Henson thought it unlikely that anyone could achieve anything like the same suspension of disbelief with caricatured puppet people. [Chapter 9, Here's One I Made Earlier, p. 117-118]
The thing that was most distressing about the first show, at least for Fluck and myself, was how appalling our caricatures looked. The crude glare of the television lights seemed to maximize their every defect in a way that was truly cringe-making for us both. [...] Fluck, totally usurping the lighting director's authority, commanded, "Turn out half the lights." "Which half?" came the subtle reply, but Fluck - not about to be blinded by science - roared back, "Any half!" [Chapter 9, Here's One I Made Earlier, p. 125]
When Spitting Image was being filmed the studio floor, accustomed for twenty years to the stately measures of Crossroads, would look like a cross between a madhouse and a slaughterhouse. There would be heads and bits of bodies all over the shop and puppeteers on the verge of dementia trying to synchronise awkward latex mouths with pre-recorded in-character voices. [...]
It would take one hour of studio time, television most sacred commodity, to produce one screenable minute of Spitting Image. Fluck's suggestion of retitling the show The Enough Money for a Mental Hospital Show was not regarded as very funny.
[...] the team of youngsters [...] we had slaving in the workshop [...] called the show Splitting Headache.
[Chapter 9, Here's One I Made Earlier, p. 126, 130]
I can remember [John] Lloyd flatly refusing to entertain a workshop idea that we should introduce the Queen Mother puppet by having her win an arm-wrestling competition with her younger daughter with a slug of gin at stake. Eventually Lloyd introduced the Queen Mother puppet deftly by having her pop up after the final credits had rolled to say how disappointed she was not to have been in the show. This episode yielded our all-time top viewing figure of 11.4 million, though it had been a shade over-promoted. In anticipation of the Queen Mother caricature the Daily Express had got us off to a magnificent start by instructing all its readers to switch off in protest against "squalid backroom boys who hide snide and shallow jokes behind their sniggering puppet faces". Naturally, they all switched on.
From then on we had no real problems with the Royals, who became one of the show's more enduring mini sit-coms. Our treatment of them was robust, but I like to think that we never lowered the tone of the monarchy quite as far as Rupert Murdoch's Sun. Ultimately of course nobody lowered the tone quite as efficiently as the Royals themselves.
[Chapter 10, Hit and Miss, p. 139]
[...] Fluck and I, after years of having to negotiate our grotesques into print, were both astonished by how much it was possible to get away with on television. The week Reagan bombed Libya with Mrs Thatcher's approval, we did a sketch [...] Reagan as a shepherd with Mrs Thatcher jumping through hoops before finally licking her master's bottom. It aroused very little comment, but when we tried to publish the final image on the cover of a Spitting Image book the lawyers went ballistic. We could be as rude as rude on TV, but not in print. [...]
I'm still not sure why we enjoyed such latitude in these areas, but I think the ephemeral nature of television had a lot to do with it. That, and the fact that the English only seem to take two things seriously, gardening and literature. As for the box - "it's only television".
[Chapter 10, Hit and Miss, p. 140-141]
In the first [sketch on tape of the Bulgarian satire show Coo Coo], a black news reporter appeared on the screen outside the Bulgarian Parliament. As eminent MPs left the building the news reporter introduced himself, saying he was from Utamba in Africa, and asking if they would like to comment on the troubled situation in that country. He then raised the microphone for their response. Each politician managed to come up with a resourceful, and solicitous, exposition of his party's position on Utamba, which of course did not exist. [...] the technique would later become familiar when a comedian called Ali G appeared on the scene. [Chapter 11, Spitting Imperialism, p. 148]
[...] I was mortified to read that the Italian government had resigned en masse only a few days before the Italian show was due to go on air. I rang their producer to commiserate over what seemed like a disaster - all the puppets we had made were of politicians on the now fallen government. But for him it was 'no problemo'. He explained that as all the same politicians would re-emerge, but in different jobs, the show could still be topical with only minor adjustment. [Chapter 11, Spitting Imperialism, p. 149-150]
[...] The Russians kept in close touch, undertaking to send 'probationers' to London to acquire our arcane skills. Again there were complications of a deeply obscure nature. Shortly one of their scheduled visits I received the following fax from Moscow:
"To our great misfortune the situation with the project Rubber Souls [a play on the title of Gogol's book Dead Souls] turned out to be a detective story. The person who was in charge for organizing the probationer's trip to London committed sabotage by some unknown reasons (which are going to be clarified by the specialists). Judging by the fact that there was no objective reasons for this and we didn't doubt qualification and decentness of the employee until recent, so we only may propose an intellectual spying ... Hoping that soon we shall be able to receive explanation of the accident we expect your understanding ..."
[...] It all culminated in a farewell supper [...] it was all unbelievably amicable, until we hit on the idea of a jokes competition.
The Russian's head comic write kicked off with a long, almost impenetrable story [...]
Polite laughter. But our British champion comic writer obviously thought something a shade more punchy would elicit a better response. "What," he asked, "is the difference between your mother and a terrorist?" No one knew, so he naturally supplied the answer: "You can negotiate with a terrorist."
There was shocked slavic silence, until the largest and most aggressive Russian menacingly demanded to know, "What do you mean - my mother?"
At this point our jokesmith tried to extricate himself by explaining that no slur was intended on any specific Russian mother - the gag only applied to the idea of motherhood in the most general sense, anybody's mother, even his own personal mother who, of course, he held in the very highest esteem.
"Ah," said the Russian, suddenly drained of belligerence, "you mean your mother. Ho, ho, ho."
With this interpretation it became possible for us all to raise our glasses to "the British joke".
[Chapter 11, Spitting Imperialism, p. 154-156]
[...] we had a large stroke of luck that enabled us to keep our more genuinely creative juices going, making a television movie of Peter and the Wolf, Sergei Prokofiev's classic children's story.
The idea had originated with Claudio Abbado, the Italian maestro [...] Abbado, however, seemed ready to overlook the limits of my musical education, as long as I did not take too many liberties with the story line of a boy in a forest, on intimate terms with a duck and bird, who has a serious altercation with a wolf.
Some liberties were taken, not all of them initiated by Spitting Image. It was the responsible classical music lover, Christopher Swann, who had the brilliant idea of a duck with a serious drinking problem. This allowed us to feature a marvellous Esther Williams-type underwater sequence of the duck surging down to locate the bottle of vodka he had dropped in the pond. Even so, the business of creating a credible drunken duck created severe technical problems. [...]
[Chapter 12, Trash for Cash, p. 168-170]
Few reviewers could resist making the crack about Seven Deadly Sins being our choice of subject-matter [for a pottery exhibition] because it required no original research on my part. This was calumny. In reality we had some difficulty recalling 'Lust', and we all had to work particularly hard on 'Sloth'. [Chapter 13, Not Quite Dead Yet, p. 184]
By way of easing me into the local [Australian] sensitivities, Alex [Mitchell] told me I had no need to fret about my satirical instincts or conceal them in any way. I could let them road free in any direction: "no worries", nobody was likely to get seriously upset. But I should take great care "never to knock the view".
He illustrated the point with a cautionary tale. Last year, he had been on assignment in Brazil and had written home in his dispatch, almost as an aside, "I thought Sydney had the greatest harbour in the world until I saw Rio ..." Mega huge mistake. "Mate, the protest mail came in by the sackload. If I'd said I was going to barbecue a live koala on the steps of the Opera House I would not have got one tenth of the outcry." Alex suggested that if I couldn't think of anything sufficiently laudatory to say about the city's appearance I should take refuge in Gore Vidal's observation to the effect that "Sydney is the city that San Francisco thinks it is."
[Chapter 14, The Blue Beyond, p. 192-193]
Sydney's winters are not unlike English summers only with sun. [Chapter 14, The Blue Beyond, p. 197]
At one point I felt the urge to wander off into the bush on my own, but this met with opposition from a Yolgnu guide. I was told that this was only done in twos. When I pleaded that it was not my intention to go very far on my own, I was told that was all very well but "How will we know it's you when you come back?" [Chapter 14, The Blue Beyond, p. 204]
[The lyrebirds] are incredible mimics. In the Jamieson Gorge they have adopted the roar of the chainsaw as a calling song. The chainsaw has been banned from this national park for twenty years, so knowledge of the sound must have been passed from parent to chick. They lyrebird also does a very good line in car alarm imitations, all very exotic and surreal. [Chapter 15, Change of Life, p. 215]
Pot Shots, the film I conceived, wrote and directed [...] took all of one day to get in the can. [...] The plot was not too hard to follow. [Johnny] Vegas was required to play a series of unappreciated, near demented historical potters from George Ohr, the "Mad Potter of Biloxi" down to the present day. He was encouraged to rant against the obtuseness of clay, and bitch generally against the utter injustice of a world that accorded such low status to the potter. For the final sequence I had managed to assemble £60,000 worth of the best British pots, donated to the enterprise by their creators on the firm understanding that they would not survive. These Vegas reduced to rubble in one last huge paroxysm of rage. At the film's British première, screened in the Victoria and Albert Museum, I was happy to observe the potters in the audience exhibiting delight at this wanton orgy of destruction, while their dealers went chalk white. [Chapter 15, Change of Life, p. 221-223]
Before I stepped into the night I took the liberty of asking the great man [the naturalist David Attenborough] whether he had any keen enthusiasms, other than for the world's wildlife. He replied in positive fashion: "Yes, of course ... er ... no, not really." [Chapter 15, Change of Life, p. 221-223]
Back in Bondi I was soon embarked on a new career as an art teacher to the local infants. [...] [Waverly Council] was interested in starting up an art class for the hordes of young sprouts who thronged the area during the school holidays. The question was: Was I a fit and proper person to take them on? I was able to assure the project officer of my very keen interest in the young. Moreover, any worries they might have about my Pommy paedophile potential could be obviated by my involving my wife Deidre, who was not only an arts graduate but a past master of all the arcane child-minding skills like nose-wiping and emergency toileting. [Chapter 16, Chinese Takeaway, p. 226-227]
There are not too many Asians in Australia, but Sydney has quite a few. I had some in my class and I came across even more through my friend and Bondi neighbour, John Pinder, who organized a Sydney Comedy Festival, with a special category of competitions for children. The thing that impressed him, and me, was how totally "Australianized" a second-generation Asian can be. The children's cartoon competition was won by an 8-year-old Asian girl who submitted work featuring John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, brown-nosing George [W.] Bush, the American President, and Bush is saying, "Don't worry John, the bullshit comes out this end." [Chapter 16, Chinese Takeaway, p. 228-229]
Passport control at Beijing airport has a huge video screen flashing up "Thou Shalt Nots" in Chinese and English. The taxi ride from the airport goes promptly on my list of "Shalt Nots" - an adrenaline-soaked nightmare in a mobile matchbox. [Chapter 16, Chinese Takeaway, p. 230]
Li Jin lives and works in a tower block. He is an ink and wash artist who has taken ancient literati brush painting and given it a contemporary relevance. His sheer skill is revered by all the artists we have met, including Fang Lijun, who told me this story: "Oh, Li Jin is the real artist. When we were students he would take us drawing in the park. He would set us up and then nonchalantly engage a passer-by in conversation while eating a large apple. After a while he would stop munching and turn the apple around, revealing a caricature of the passer-by he'd made with his teeth." [Chapter 16, Chinese Takeaway, p. 235-236]
Getting up at Clare [in the Clare Valley, South Australia] in the morning is a deafening experience: magpies carol, kookaburras laugh, majestic smoke-grey, chocolate-headed ducks stomp across the grassland, white cockatoos and grey galahs cackle in the gardens, and thousands of twittering small emerald-green parrots hang upside down in skeins, like emerald jewellery, from flowering vines. The only drab note was provided by a Pom migrant, a funereal black-bird, fluttering by. It reminded [Tony Clifton], who is addicted to metaphor, of "a vicar avoiding a tart's birthday party". [Chapter 17, Berk and Wimp, p. 241-242]
[...] we drove over an arid and desolate stretch of road, the Oodnadatta track, to Marree. It was a long drive but I was able to beguile [Tony Clifton] with my singing of "You Are My Sunshine" which he likened to "the sound of a constipated elephant seal straining over its morning motion". [Chapter 17, Berk and Wimp, p. 248-249]
Of all the hostels I've frequented, the Last Resort in Broome the west coast of Western Australia was the most memorable. [...] the kitchen could only have been improved by a scud missile attack. [Chapter 18, Walkabout, p. 252]
[...] I did notice a touching monument by the side of the [Lizard Race Track in Eulo] which I must have missed on my earlier visit. It commemorated "Destructo", the racing cockroach from Bondi, accidentally stepped on after winning the challenge cup against the champion lizard "Wooden Head" on 22 August 1981. [Chapter 19, Home and Away, p. 270]
During the day bilbies live beneath the ground in spiral burrows, and to conserve their energy they withdraw all blood from their large ears until they lie crumpled on their heads. [...] The males have two tusks 2 centimetres long and are exceedingly cunning. Very hard to catch.
The few males they do manage to snare are brought into Charleville's wildlife centre to breed and are later released back into the wild wearing a radio collar. There are no trees in Astrebla so the rangers set up their radio mast on top of a shed. A wedge-tailed eagle immediately build a nest in it and at night the dingoes circled the shed hoping one of the chicks would fall out of the nest. Life in Astrebla is tough for all species. [Chapter 19, Home and Away, p. 271-272]
There is nothing an Aussie likes better than a fence. [...] Every Australian state has rabbit-proof fences. [...] In recent years solar-powered electric fences have become all the rage. The most notorious fence was the 8,000 volt effort built by John Howard's government in Woomera to help protect the indigenous population from the enclosed Iranian and Afghan asylum seekers. The bilbies were also destined to have an electric fence, by its purpose was more benign. [Chapter 19, Home and Away, p. 272]
One of [Murray Sayle's] problems in getting a handle on events was that most of his contemporaries were dead or "had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana skin". [Chapter 20, No Worries, p. 276]

From Funny Business - An Outsider's Year in Japan by Gary Katzenstein (Grafton Books, New York, 1990):

[...] I caught the train to Hiro Station [...] When I had finished my shopping chores, I couldn't find the subway station and asked a passerby. "Hiro Station?" he said, looking quizzical. "No, not around here." I asked again, this time a woman. After long reflection, she motioned for me to follow and led me five blocks to a station. "Here," she said politely, then bowed and walked away.
Just to check, I asked a young man in English, "Is this Hiro Station?"
"No," he began, "it's --" He stopped. "Oh," he said, "I see. You mean Hiroo. Yes, yes, it is!"
I could see that with the slightest deviation in pronunciation I would be in trouble. An evening in Los Angeles's Little Tokyo came back to me. I wanted to try out the Japanese I was intensely studying in anticipation of my trip. I tried ordering pickles in a restaurant but managed to ask for male genitals, much to the amused astonishment of the Japanese diners. [possibly mixing 性器(sei.ki) (genital) and 漬(tsu)keru (to pickle) -- Fred]
[Chapter 3, p. 33-34]
I took the train to Ueno Park, where an arts festival was under way. On the grounds were two concert halls, the Tokyo zoo, several museums, and the Toshogu Shrine, a complex wooden structure ringed by an exquisite Japanese garden. The footbridges and the arches were a bright red; the garden's shrubbery and rock outcroppings, all perfectly balanced. Outside, strollers wandered among the jizo statues, primitive stone figures wearing red caps, many with pinwheels next to them; inside, a tea ceremony was under way.
It was exactly as it had been described to us in our orientation: a highly stylized ritual with all the aestetic Japanese elements present. Concentration. Texture. Acerbity. Scarcity. Contrast.
Each movement was done silently, with perfect attention. The ceramic bowls were turned in the celebrants' hands before drinking so they might feel the highly irregular texture of the asymmetrically coloured pieces. Even the tea had its special texture as it frothed up after being stirred as it brewed. Sweets were served, just a few, extremely sweet, the excessive sweetness contrasting with the bland (sometimes bitter) tea.
Wandering downhill from the temple, I came upon a shed. Inside were two men and two women dressed in long, dark-blue skirts and plain white blouses, the traditional dress of the warrior. One man and one woman stood motionless on the wooden floor, both facing in the same direction. I couldn't imagine what was happening. Then I heard a whoosh and a thud. Looking toward the sound of the impact, I saw targets. The two people were perfectly immobile, statues with bows in their hands. Slowly they put down their bows and left the platform. The other pair took their place with great ceremony. They selected arrows with painstaking care, then stood silent. After some moments, they raised their bows effortlessly. The man drew back the bowstring and held it poised for some time. The discipline and intensity were amazing.
The arrow flew. It shot forward and into the target's precise centre. After perhaps a minute, his companion replicated his motions and similarly pierced the target's heart. Had there been no bows, no arrows, I might have mistaken it for a religious ceremony.
[Chapter 3, p. 34-35]
I took up chatting with a vengeance and even managed to have a simple conversation with Sato-san, the young woman who sat behind me. [...] As my conversational skills increased, I found that often I would start a sentence only to be interrrupted by the person I was addressing. They're not very patient, I would think and I'd stop speaking. Only they would, too, and there would be dead silence.
The times they initiated a conversation their sentences seemed curiously punctuated. Although I waited to hear them out, they never seemed to finish a thought. The longer they spoke, the more hesitant they seemed to get. Sentences were left dangling; it was maddening.
Every other sentence seemed to end with a question: "Ne?" "Right?" It eventually dawned on me that the appropriate response was, "Soo desu ne." "Yes, it's true."
I also began to add the hesitant ne to my assertions, and to reply with soo desu ne to observations made to me. Thus I slowly learned aizuchi, the little words and phrases that aided the flow of conversation in Japanese.
The speaker expects a listener to occasionally interject an aizuchi, such as "I see ... I hear you ... Is that so? ... Right". This is to show involvement. Hearing an aizuchi word interrupting him, the speaker knows the other person is attentive and listening. Not being interrupted makes the speaker think the listener isn't following or is upset.
One morning, Takagai-san answered the phone and turned to me, saying, "This telephone call is for you, but ..."
"'But' what?" I said.
"'But' ... it is just a word. 'But'. It's what you say at the end of a sentence so as not to sound too ... too ..." He faltered. "To give balance," he said, finally, and I understood.
It was like "probably", another word I often heard at the end of a declaration. Questions put to me were similarly fuzzed. People would pose a question: "Do you want a cup of tea?" Then add, "... or something?" Or else they would say, "Would you like a cookie ... more or less?"
Naru, the verb "to become", was similarly common - that is, things rarely happened due to cause and effect. Instead, they would just "become". Nohara-san would never say, "I didn't get my work done so I had to stay late and work overtime." He would say, "Overtime became necessary". It was no one's fault; it just happened: It became necessary.
These were all small ambiguous expressions that allowed others to participate. They were invitations to partake that made communication a group endeavour. Their ambiguity also robbed sentences of any possible aggressive tenor, rendering them curiously oblique, and their passive construction made it seem as if no one person was ever solely responsible.
I understood perfectly as I discussed with several co-workers some simple office arrangements. Bits and pieces of a sentence would be supplied by three or four people. It was as if everyone was finishing the sentence for the other person, only to have someone else pick up the sentence and continue. The group was speaking. The group was harmonious; the speakers, content.
[Chapter 4, p. 45-47]
[...] It seemed to me that the citizens of Tokyo could call up visual images of their streets with near total recall as to all landmarks. Instead of names and topographic directions, or points of intersection, the Japanese oriented and guided themselves by recollections of physical features. It was like dealing with Eskimos.
I was often told to meet someone near a certain statue of a dog, or under a certain restaurant's neon sign. Streets would be referred to by their dominant edifice. I would be told to look for a friend "on the McDonald's side" of the street. The relationship between places was what mattered, even in the instance of maps."
Japanese maps, in fact, did not even always show distances drawn to scale. Nor was north automatically to be presumed the primary point of orientation. Sometimes north was on the bottom, sometimes on top, or not given at all. The trick was to think of the map's contents as a group. The relationships within the group were accurate, but the group's relation to the outside world was ambiguous. Such information was not viewed as critical.
It was this other psychology or mindset that I contemplated when an invitation came for me to attend a meeting of Sony's English Club. I was delighted to accept as I hoped to meet a lot more English-speaking employees all at once and perhaps even find one of them who would be willing to have me work for him, as I seemed to be struck doing next to nothing where I was.
The club turned out to have about twenty members who met once a week after work. It was their aim to improve their reading and writing skills. [...]
The meeting opened with several of the men reading aloud from their business memos. I listened attentively as the first businessman, then the second, then the third read their memoranda. They read in incomprehensible syllables that I took to be some kind of technical or scientific Japanese because I couldn't understand a word. Slowly it became evident that these memos had been written by Japanese employees of Sony posted in the [United] States. The memos had been sent back to headquarters in Tokyo, where we sat, and were being read - in English - as models to be imitated by club members.
To say that most were grammatically incorrect would have been the grossest understatement. They were, in fact, unfathomable, incomprehensible - in a word: gibberish. Nor could one have gotten past the bizarre accent in which they were being read. The deadpan renditions of these memos, done with utmost seriousness, were just a travesty. You couldn't understand what in the world these men were saying. Yet the club members seemed to have no difficulty in following the baffling sentences.
[...] After the fourth reader finished his interpretation, my comments were solicited. I broke out in a cold sweat. A swirl of realisations alighted in my poor brain. It was not mispronunciation I was listening to, or specific bastardised words. These people were speaking some other language. But how and what?
All Japanese students, I knew, studied English for six years. However, they did not study it in order to speak it; their only goal was to pass the national college examinations. Since native speakers were not allowed to teach in Japanese public schools, all were taught English by other Japanese. A handful of instructors may have lived or studied abroad, and perhaps had better pronunciation and more natural usage skills, but most spoke with heavy accents and in stilted English derived from outmoded textbooks. The students memorised long lists of vocabulary, replete with archaic expressions, and studied elaborate rules of syntax divorced from all context. Hour after hour they imitated their teacher's pronunciation, and the end result was this - some incredible closed linguistic system.
All, I realised sitting there, had throughly mastered this non-English and could understand each other. What observations might I make, perhaps? the senior person wanted to know.
My stomach tumbling - cornered - I told them the truth: what they had been reading aloud bore almost no relationship to English as spoken and written by native English speakers.
Eyes blinked but remained steady, faces remained impassive. It took a few moments for my comment to be addressed. Perhaps they had mistaken my simple Japanese, or they could not believe what I said. But my words did at last penetrate enough to provoke a cold indignation. My opinion was brushed aside. It was implied that I didn't know what I was talking about. We moved on to pronunciation practice.
I was treated to some odd utterances, only faintly related to my native tongue. Prevailed upon to correct their speech, I did so, only to be told my pronunciation was mistaken, my corrections, errors. They were speaking correctly; they had to be, because they had no trouble understanding one another. I would not, I had the distinct impression, be invited back to the English Club.
[Chapter 4, p. 56-60]
The one way in which Sony favourably differed from other companies was that Sony employees worked Saturdays only occasionally. In most firms, employees worked put in the extra day as a matter of course. Recently, the government had actually recognised the physical and psychological toll of this national workaholism and was encouraging businesses to cut back hours. The necessity of the six-day, sixty-hour week, it argued, was over; the postwar economy had been rebuilt.
The bureau set up to promote this concept was called the Office of Not Working on Saturday. According to the papers, the bureau was not having much success despite a valiant effort. The staff was working day and night, six days a week.
[Chapter 5, p. 76-77]
Most of the time I tried to make my calls from the dormitory pay phones, especially the yellow one on my floor. There was no privacy but in the early evening the hall was usually quiet. One night I had been talking with Joel for nearly twenty minutes when Hashimoto-san came bustling out of his office toward me, making cutting motions across his neck.
"Too long! Too long!" he called out.
I hung up and inquired what was the matter.
"Your calls are too long, too long. The limit is ten minutes. That is the rule."
My head swivelled. There were two other pay phones, neither one in use as there was no one around. But I did not even bother to protest. Rules were rules.
[Chapter 6, p. 81]
[...] I asked [Maruyama-san] why the innkeepers had denied me a room. Was it economics? Did they want more paying guests per room?
"Oh, no," she said. "No doubt they were afraid. In Japan, people who travel alone are thought to be terribly odd."
"How so?"
"Persons who rent single accommodations in mountain areas like Chuzenji often do so because they are intending to commit suicide. Normal people, Gary-san, always travel in groups."
[Chapter 6, p. 86-87]

From More About the Japanese by Jack Seward (3rd Edn, Lotus Press, Japan):

The [sumo] match itself is easy to explain: Two mighty wrestlers in black-silk loin-cloths ponderously enter a slightly elevated, clean-swept, circular sand ring that is about fifteen feet in diameter. They bow to each other, clap their hands to call the attention of the gods, raise first one leg, then the other to prove they carry no concealed weapons, purify themselves by rinsing out their mouths with water, purify the area by tossing handfuls of salt over it, stamp evil spirits into the sand of the ring with their feet, do deep knee-bends to limber up, and sometimes daintily wipe away the sweat from under their arms with pieces of snow-white paper. After all this, they proceed a step or two closer to the business at hand by getting down with their knuckles in the sand and fixing their foe with a steady glower, the purpose of which is partly to unnerve him telepathically and partly to assess his combativeness, his mental conditioning, his eagerness for the pending fray.
Seldom will either sumo-tori lunge at the other until he has crouched down, glared, then carelessly turned away two or three times (contributing greatly to the tension building in the audience), but the referee limits these false starts to four minutes, after which he turns his ceremonial fan in the opposite direction, thereby informing the contestants that he will allow no more horsing around.
Down again the two mastodons go into a crouch and steel themselves while the referee -- looking like something out a Hieronymus Bosch painting [...] -- screams exhortations and orders at them in a high-pitched, deliberately-broken voice designed to echo down the halls of nightmarish memory for years. (Like most of the wrestlers, the referees too being training for their profession as children and are taught to deliberately break their voices by screaming into the gales that buffet the rocky coasts of Japan in winter.)
[Their Imperial Sport, p. 70-71]
[...] In the same way, the Japanese will often over-react when they emerge from long years of tight conformity and repressed individuality and at last reach the freer air atop their own hill, be it large or small.
This is why more than a few Japanese, upon becoming company presidents or chiefs of government bureaus, will change, like Jekyll to Hyde, from bowing, affable section chiefs or what have you to arrogant, egotistical tyrants, given over to capricious individualism. Some, however, may cloak these tendencies with a mantle of humanitarianism that is, nonetheless, founded on an overweening assumption of charismatic superiority that is nearly as repellent. These fancy themselves beneficent dictators who could solve the problems of the entire world, if only the fools would listen. With almost no one to restrain them, they sometimes come up with really preposterous ideas that contrast oddly with the sound business judgement which helped them reach their pinnacles. I am reminded of the president of one Japanese petrochemical company who not only instructed his three thousand employees exactly how to vote in all political elections but also gave them the frequent benefit of his advice regarding the smallest details of their private lives. One day when he chanced to have several hundred of them at his mercy, he found himself in a generous mood and began to toss out pearls of medical wisdom about how best to cure common ailments. When he got around to headaches, he scoffed at aspirin and the like and recommended instead that his employees place their faith in a remedy he had used for many years. Standing up straight, he closed his eyes and let his arms dangle limply at his side. Then he began to twist his trunk slowly at first from side to side, all the while chanting the Buddhist prayer "Namu Amida Butsu." As his motion increased, his arms rose higher and higher until at last they were swinging back and forth in a semi-circle at the level of his shoulders. Pausing a few seconds in his strident prayer-chanting, he explained that this was actually a form of self-hypnotism that would cure any headache in short order.
After several minutes of increasingly vigorous movement, however, he uttered a sharp cry and fell to the floor writhing in pain. At the hospital later, his doctor announced that he was treating the man for a strained ligament in his back, nervous tension, and a severe headache.
[Their Business Ethics and Attitudes, p. 170-171]

From Sharon and my Mother-in-Law by Suad Amiry (Granta Books, London, 2005):

The multitudes of the Heacock's friends and acquaintances met at Roger's house. That evening confirmed my long-held belief that Palestine is the world's centre for kitsch.
The auction's theme was Palestina Vulgaris, and up for were a transistor radio in the shape of half a watermelon, with big black seeds; a red balloon in the shape of a VW car; a stuffed eagle; a Swiss Alps Silvana box of chocolates (which tasted more like soap from Nablus); a Henry the Eighth embroidered tableau; a highly decorated French-style vase; two Italian baroque angel statues; a mirror with a seashell frame; someone's mother's wedding dress; a set of plastic teacups; a heavy sealed glass box filled with blue sea water and two small floating boats; an electric fountain with pink balls that bobbed up and down when you plugged it in. But nothing could beat my electric Mecca tableau.
[Chapter 8, Palestina Vulgaris, p. 95-96]
All it takes is a bit of humour, I thought to myself, as Nura and I passed the same soldier as we drove back to Ramallah that same afternoon.
[Chapter 9, A Dog's Life, p. 107-108]

From Dr. Karl's collection of great Australian facts & firsts by Karl Kruszelnicki (HarperCollins, Australia, 2002):

Over 2000 years ago, the Greeks and Romans were taught how to swim as a part of their training to be soldiers. The Romans had swimming pools that were quite separate from their baths. [...] In Japan around the first century BC they had swimming races and this tradition lasted so long that swimming training was compulsory in Japanese schools until the 17th century.
By 1500, swimming had become very unpopular in Europe. People thought that you could get a disease from the water by swimming in it.
[p. 268-269]
The fourth Australian flag appeared in 1851. It was th flag of the Australian Anti-transportation Society [which] wanted to stop the transportation of convicts from Britain to the eastern colonies of what would later be called Australia. [...]
In the early 1850s, the Swordfish was the first trading ship to carry the flag of the Anti-transportation Society. It was sailing under the command of Captain John Clinch on a river inlet in Hobart. Captain J.H. Gennys of the British ship Fantome was passing by. He didn't recognise the new flag and demanded that this strange flag be taken down.
Captain Clinch shouted back angrily: "That's the Australian flag -- the Southern Cross -- the symbol of freedom! And it's about time we had our own flag, too!"
Captain Gennys was not impressed. "Indeed! You know as well as I do there's no Australian flag. Haul it down at once, sir, or I'll do it myself!"
[...]
Captain Clinch was angry at being forced to take the flag down and scornfully hoisted a tablecloth up onto the mast. He wanted to show the British ship that he would fly anything rather than a British flag!
[p. 279-280]
One unfortunate person who badly needed an Australian flag was Mr E.H. Flack [who] was the only person competing for Australia in the 1896 Olympic Games, which were held in Athens. At this time Australia was not even called Australia - it was still a collection of colonies.
He won both the 800 metres and 1500 metres races. But there was no Australian flag to raise in his honour. At the presentation ceremony officials did what they could and hauled up an Austrian flag instead!
[p. 288]

From The quotable musician : from Bach to Tupac by Sheila E Anderson (Allworth, NY, 2003):

If you run hard enough and live long enough the wrinkles won't catch up with you. -- Harry Belafonte, in response to actor Danny Glover asking him what his secret was to looking so good. [p. 69]
If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong. -- Simon Rattle [p. 81]
Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought two or three seats. -- Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Michigan [p. 84]
Bach is like an astronomer who, with the help of ciphers, finds the most wonderful stars ... Beethoven embraced the universe with the power of his spirit ... I do not climb so high. A long time ago, I decided that my universe will be the soul and heart of man. -- Frederic Chopin [p. 96]
I occasionally play works by contemporary composers, and for two reasons. First, to discourage the composer from writing any more, and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven. -- Jascha Heifetz [p. 96]
Handel understands effect better than any of us - when he chooses, he strikes like a thunderball. -- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart [p. 97]
If I had as many love affairs as I've been given credit for, I'd be in a jar in the Harvard Medical School. -- Frank Sinatra [p. 108]
Music, drawing, books, invention and exercise will be so many resources to you against ennui. -- Thomas Jefferson, to his daughter Martha [p. 108]
The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken -- Jeff Clayton, Saxophonist [p. 108]
[The same quote was attributed to Dr Samuel Johnson in Clifford Pickover's book "Strange Brains and Genius - The Secret Life of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen" by Clifford A. Pickover, 1998, Plenum Press, NY:]
People who make a living doing something they don't like wouldn't be happy with a one-day work week. -- Duke Ellington [p. 115]
Let go of that hate in your heart, it will kill you quicker than cancer. -- Benny Carter, saxophonist and composer, to drummer and former host on Jazz 88.3 FM, WBGO, Newark, Kenny Washington when Washington was in the throws of a nasty divorce [p. 116]
The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost. -- Bennett Cerf [p. 136]
When she started to play, Steinway himself came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano. -- Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller [p. 136]
I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else. -- Lily Tomlin [p. 137]
I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the pages of glass with its claws. -- Charles Baudelaire [p. 138]
Wagner's music is better than it sounds. -- Mark Twain [p. 138]
One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend hearing it a second time. -- Gioacchino A. Rossini [p. 138]
I like Wagner's music better than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage. -- Oscar Wilde [p. 183]
Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of bleeding, he sings. -- Ed Gardiner [p. 138]
Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf. -- Oscar Wilde [p. 138]
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. -- Aldous Huxley [p. 144]
A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. -- Leopold Stokowski [p. 144]
Beautiful? It's all a question of luck. I was born with good legs. As for the rest ... beautiful, no. Amusing, yes. -- Josephine Baker [p. 148]
I'm sensitive, I feel the hurt, and the pain like everybody else does. But, the difference is, I don't see no barriers. People may try to block you, but they can only block you if you give them power. -- Andy Bey, Pianist and vocalist [p. 150]
Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung. -- Voltaire [p. 154]
If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing. -- Zimbabwe proverb [p. 154]
There is delight in singing, though none hear it beside the singer. -- Walter Savage Landor [p. 155]
People have tried to explain in words what the power of music is - and usually failed. All we know is that sometimes, a short song ... can have as much impression on a listener as reading a whole novel can. A song is often a triumph of oversimplification ... [It's] like a basketball backboard, and you bounce the experiences of your life against it, and it bounces back new meanings ... Singing a song can be an active reaffirmation ... yes, this is something I believe in. Strange fruit hanging from the poplar tree - no one had ever thought of that connection before, and Abel though of it. -- Pete Seeger, Strange Fruit, a documentary by Joel Katz, © 2002 Oniera Films LLC [p. 157]
Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already. -- Gustav Mahler, to Bruno Walter, who had stopped to admire mountain scenery in rural Austria [p. 170]
Music should either be done in a church or in someone's home. -- Gustav Theodore Holst [p. 194]
What the world really needs in more love and less paperwork. -- Pearl Bailey [p. 195]
I've always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that's where great art and music happens. -- Miles Davis [p. 198]
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. -- Victor Hugo [p. 198]
The melody is generally what the piece is all about. The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer would be, "Yes." And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, "No." -- Aaron Copland [p. 199]
There is so much to be done on earth, do it soon! I cannot carry on the everyday life I am living; art demands this sacrifice, too. Rest, diversion, amusement - only so that I can function more powerfully in my art. -- Ludwig van Beethoven, from his journal, in 1814. [p. 202]

From A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder by Eric Abrahamson & David H. Freedman (Little, Brown and Co., NY, 2006):

[...] One Columbia University professor's office has gradually become so densely packed with towers of papers and books that the school finally assigned him a second office so that students could meet with him in relative comfort and safety. When Nobel laureate and University of Chicago economics professor Robert Fogel found his desk becoming massively piled, he simply installed a second desk behind him that now competes in towering clutter with the first. His colleague at the school, chemist Stephen Berry, a recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant" award, works among a landscape of eighteen-inch-high piles that have harbored individual documents for as long as two decades.
[Chapter 2, A Mess Sampler, p. 28]
As it happens, it was [Kathleen] Manton-Jones's landscaping interests that landed her in trouble in Winterhaven [a neighbourhood of drought-stricken Tucson, Arizona]. Specifically, her affront to the community is having replaced most of her neat, plain green lawn - a form of plant life ecologically and historically alien to the region - with a more natural, varied, and water-thrifty landscape of indigenous flowers, grasses, and shrubs. She quickly found out that the residents of Winterhaven are, by and large, emotionally, politically, and, to hear them tell it, legally committed to having neatly trimmed green grass and little else surrounding the homes in their community. [...]
[A Tuscon Weekly article 2004-02-19 about Kathleen Manton-Jones and low-water plants]
[...] Americans lavish $8 billion a year in products and services on them and pour fifty million pounds of pesticides and manufactured fertilizers over them, making the flying of tiny yellow "hazardous to children and pets" flags a familiar sight [...]
Aside from all the maintenance they require, lawns are ecological disasters. Closely trimmed grass has short roots and doesn't hold moisture well. That means, for one thing, that grass tends to croak when not regularly watered; the watering costs for a fifty-foot-by-fifty-foot lawn can add nearly $100 per month to a Boston-area water and sewer bill, for example. It also means that heavy rain doesn't readily soak into the soil, leading to run-off and attendant problems with flooding, erosion, and the distribution of the pesticides, fertilizers, and other chemicals needed to avoid the dreaded sparse lawn or greenbrown patches. Grass offers almost nothing of use to birds and other normally welcome wildlife.
[...]
On a stroll through the surrounding neighborhoods [of Winterhaven, near Tuscon], Manton-Jones points out some of the alternatives that the community finds more palatable than natural landscaping. A few yards are mostly baked dirt. Another consists of a large bed of pebbles, and one is entirely bricked in. None of these yards has offended the community enough to inspire fines or threats; after all, they may not be pretty or alive, but they are neat and orderly. Continuing along occasionally requires detouring around filthy puddles taking up half the street, formed by run-off from sprinklers, and in some spots the asphalt is rippled and torn from being frequently submerged -- a strange problem in a desert city. We also pass a house with natural landscaping. The owner of this home had quietly paid his fines, later expressing his feelings in the form of a large metal sculpture in his front yard on top of which sits a lawn mower, extending upward like a middle finger.
[Chapter 2, A Mess Sampler, p. 35-37]
As the phone networks went digital in the 1990s [...] all this electronic noise became relatively easy to clean up [...] That left background sounds as the one remaining form of phone noise [...] Seeing an opportunity not only to eliminate this final distraction but also to conserve precious cell-phone battery life and channel capacity, engineers finally developed sophisticated computer techniques for Stripping out the background cacophony and sending only the speaker's voice. And during the pauses between speech, the network wouldn't have to transmit anything, no matter what was going on in the background. Why take the trouble to pipe through the roar of a nearby lawn mower? The only thing the person on the other end needed to hear was the speaker's voice, punctuated by glorious near silence. What could be more agreeable? What could be more efficient? What could be neater?
Just one little problem: callers hated it. Specifically, the absence of background noise leads to three difficulties. First of all [...] When the background noise is removed, the faint echoes can be made out again [...] Unlike background noise, which is random and messy, an echo is a type of correlated noise - its pattern follows that of the speaker's voice, but is shifted in time. Our brains are good at ignoring a stream of random noise, but neater, correlated noise is highly distracting.
Second, background noise creates a sense of "presence." It lets you know that the call is still connected, even if the person at the other end isn't speaking at the moment. "We've been trained to hear small background noises in phone conversations," Bourget explains. "Perfect silence sounds like a hang up. The background noise isn't really just noise. It's a form of information, providing feedback that someone is still there." People who hear complete silence at any point during a phone conversation tend to interrupt the conversation with "Hello?" and "Are you still there?"
Finally, we don't live in sealed containers. We live in a world where things that make noises are constantly near us, where in a sense even the space around us has a faint murmur to it. This noise feels right to us; at an unconscious level, it is reassuring. The technical term for this type of background noise, in fact, is comfort noise - engineers like Bourget call it CN - and trying to talk to someone in the absence of it is a bit disorienting and even a little creepy. Our brains rebel at the unnatural neatness.
The background noise had to come back. But engineers were loath to give up the battery life and channel capacity they had saved by eliminating its transmission. So they came up with a compromise. The background noise would still be stripped out, but it wouldn't be entirely discarded. Instead it would be "sampled" - that is, a computer in the network would analyze it and pull out key characteristics, such as how often its pitch varied and by how much. These characteristics would then be transmitted to the other end of the network, where a computer would use a mathematical technique - G.71 1.11, for example - to reconstruct a simulation of the background noise and add it back in with the voice. This tortuous-sounding trick fools listeners of cell-phone talkers everywhere just fine, even if it would never occur to them to appreciate it or even notice. It's not a perfect solution, of course. Once in a while, background noise can be so excessive that a little creepy silence might be welcome. And there's one type of background noise that trips up the technique: music on hold. When someone tries to speak over music on hold, the network assumes the music is noise, strips it out, and substitutes a simulated version, which, depending on the music, often comes out sounding something like a raspy wheeze.
[Chapter 2, A Mess Sampler, p. 50-52]
[...] the Case Western Reserve University business school wanted a new marquee building for 2002. School decision makers found themselves drawn to architect Frank Gehry's controversial but widely acclaimed style.
Designs such as the titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Dr.-Seussish Ray and Maria Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology blend swooping and jutting fun-house-mirror elements into imposing forms that imbue interior spaces with complex personalities and rarely fail to elicit emotional responses from observers. Case Western hoped for its own attention-grabbing design, and Gehry and his associates didn't disappoint, ultimately unveiling a scale model of a building of wildly askew components seemingly caught in midexplosion, all of it wrapped and pierced by a river of writhing metal ribbon. The school approved the design and brought in a small army of contractors to build it. The contractors duly admired, in a shocked and fretful way, the model of the God-awfully complex structure they were about to undertake, and then asked for the blueprints, to which Gehry's team replied that there weren't any. The contractors thought the group was joking, but Gehry and his associates assured the contractors they were serious. [...]
[...] Forgoing a detailed plan is disruptive - it creates convolution, making a neat and well-defined process messy. It subverts the contractors' familiar methods and procedures, forcing them to work with the Gehry team in the task of translating the look and feel of the model into a full scale structure. [...]
Freed from the constraints of a blueprint's rigid specifications and standard operating procedures, the contractors and architects were able to collaboratively rethink the design and construction techniques in any way necessary to achieve the project's goals. That led to an eruption of innovation. GQ [Contracting] ultimately developed a new technique for framing curving interior walls with unconventional materials, a breakthrough that [...] later led to a highly profitable new line of business. Hunt Construction [...] created a new approach to surveying construction sites; Columbia Wire and Iron Works [...] came up with a machine to double-bend steel beams; [...] DeSimon Structural Engineers developed two new framing methods for structural steel; A. Zahner Company [...] invented a new way to assemble metal panels. Not only was the finished building a stunning hit, completed on time and within budget, but most of the contractors were so pleased with the invention into which they had been pushed that they ended up changing the way they do business. Even in the highly conservative construction industry, not all surprises have to be nasty ones.
[Chapter 4, The Benefits of Mess, p. 87-89]
[...] Word started to get out among book lovers in university-lousy Greater Boston that the small warehouse was a stimulating and rewarding, if slightly goofy, place to stumble through an eclectic and oddly arranged selection of discount books.
Today the New England Mobile Book Fair - or "Strymish's," as it's known locally - stands within five miles of two Barnes & Noble and two Borders stores comprising some 120,000 square feet of direct competition. The squat, featureless warehouse - originally a tennis-racket factory - [...] still outsells each of the four superstores in the area.
[Chapter 7, Mess and Organisations, p. 149]
Foreign visitors to Parisian parks are sometimes surprised to be accosted by a uniformed guard who brusquely tells them to get off the grass, or, if they have children, to remove them to another section of the park altogether, despite the absence of signs warning of any restrictions. The visitors are not being gratuitously harassed; they are being welcomed to an essential element of French society: assuming that something is prohibited until you have positively ascertained that it is not. Though the French are fairly maniacal about distributing garish red and white INTERDIT -- "prohibited" -- signs in every nook and cranny of the country, their numbers pale in comparison to the catalog of acts one must simply know are prohibited. Rollerblading in public, touching certain merchandise in stores, not having a passport or identification card on your person, running to catch a Metro, driving with your parking lights on during the day -- these and countless other infractions can result in tickets, arrest, or forcible ejection from your immediate location. The French, for their part, find foreigners -- and especially Americans -- exceedingly childish in their petulance over being taken to task for not complying with any of a bewildering, unpredictable, and seemingly gratuitous multitude of odd restrictions. That's because the French themselves are acclimated to the pervasive concept of interdit as preschool students. There are a number of children's books dedicated to explaining to tots why the endless stream of interdits they are already encountering is critical to the smooth functioning of society. Here's how the book Interdit, Toujours Interdit, Mais Pourquoi? (Prohibited, Always Prohibited, but Why?) puts it:
All around us and in our daily lives, it seems as if there isn't anything that's not prohibited. It's enough to make you wonder if you have any rights at all! But actually, the prohibitions are essential, and there's a bright side to them. What's the point of all the prohibitions? ... What would our lives be like if everything were allowed?
It's a reasonable notion, up to a point. Children have to learn not to run out into the street or eat candy by the pound. But the idea that children must be conditioned to embrace a ubiquitous and often arbitrary array of restrictions imposed on every aspect of life seems a uniquely French one.
On the other hand, the French do make use of a colorful vocabulary of mess, including pele-mele, which the English language has borrowed as "pell-mell," and especially bordel, or "brothel." The latter is commonly employed with enthusiasm in the form of "Quel bordel!" and translates into English as "What a mess!" The French are not alone here. The use of words that mean brothel to also signify mess turns out to be nearly universal. The middle-Persian word balakhaana, which meant "an upper room," eventually made it into Turkic and thence to Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Lebanese, among several other Eastern European and Middle Eastern languages, in the form of balagan, which today is widely used to mean both "brothel" and "mess." (All English got from the deal was the word balcony.) Meanwhile, the Old Indo-European word bherdh, or "wooden plank" and later "a shack," became bordel in French, burdel in Polish, and bardak in Russian and Hebrew, again used to mean both "brothel" and "mess." English ended up with board, though also bordello, which sometimes stands in for mess in the United Kingdom, but not in the United States. Italians use casino, literally "a small house," to mean both "brothel" and "mess." One can't help wondering, in looking at this long-standing and widespread verbal intertwining of brothels and mess, if being messy didn't at one time carry a more interesting and provocative aura.
[Chapter 9, The Politics of Mess, p. 214-216]
The concept of replacing older roads that have become overrun with more traffic than they were designed to handle with new, larger, straighter, more carefully organized ones seems perfectly sensible and has been a staple of traffic engineering and urban planning going as far back as the road itself. You'd think that of all the things a municipal, county, state, or national government could do, improving roads would be a surefire winner. There's just one small drawback to the approach: traffic frequently gets worse after a larger, more carefully planned road is put in.
The reason is simple. When a better, wider road is constructed between two points, it doesn't just service the cars that were traveling between those points all along, it also attracts new drivers who are impressed with the traffic-handling capabilities of the better road. And not only does an improved road attract travelers, it also attracts residents who want to live nearer to good roads and businesses that want to be nearer to a passing stream of potential customers. Now, one might reasonably argue that this sort of development can be a good thing from some points of view, but it doesn't alter the fact that traffic increases. The injection of this "induced traffic," as traffic engineers call the increase, more often than not wipes out whatever improvements in traffic flow the new road offered, and then some. University of California researchers who studied roads in thirty urban counties discovered that for every 10 percent increase in the number of new lane-miles, traffic increased by 9 percent. Another study estimated that expanding roadways in the Greater Cincinnati area caused congestion to jump by up to 43 percent. [...] Narrower, windy, busy roads unbothered by precisely spaced entrances and exits and by cleverly timed lights may be a bit of a mess, but they'll get people where they're going faster than wider, more organized replacements clogged with neat, highly regulated traffic jams.
[Chapter 9, The Politics of Mess, p. 223-224]
[...] In December 2003 alone, New York City firefighters twice had to rescue residents nearly killed by the spectacular clutter in their homes -- one trapped for days under a massive heap of magazines and books, die other almost unreachable behind a thick crop of ceiling-high piles of paper and other materials that had somehow ignited. (The rescuing firefighter in the latter case may be one of the few people ever to be officially commended for heroism in the face of lite-threatening home clutter.) A dozen major U.S. cities have set up teams specifically tasked with helping people whose homes have become dangerously overfilled. It's far from unheard of for people to close off entire sections of their homes with impassable junk. Among the several stories of extreme clutter reported in the survey conducted for this book was one about a couple who snuck into a parent's home when he was away in order to clear out the ceiling-high piles upstairs, only to have the ceiling in one room collapse partway through the job -- it turned out the piles had been supporting the ceiling, which was straining under the weight of the massive store of clutter in the attic.
[Chapter 12, Pathological Mess, p. 272]
Judith Kolberg, the Atlanta-based professional organizer [...] noticed soon after she began taking on clients in the late 1980s that a small portion of them seemed to face deeper difficulties. [...] One client had to endure a police investigation when a new house-cleaner showed up and fled, believing the client's home had been invaded and ransacked. Another filled the kitchen with empty margarine tubs and plastic bags, leaving her husband concerned for her mental health.
[...]
Instead of foisting standard techniques on these clients, Kolberg tried to determine what they were good at and then create individualized organizational styles to match their strengths. Called in by a high-powered scientific researcher whose inability to file had led to desk piles tall enough to block his view of the doorway and had left him unable to find even the most important papers, Kolberg noticed that he seemed to think of documents in highly idiosyncratic, personal terms; a tax document, for example, reminded him of a cat veterinary bill he had taken as a deduction. So Kolberg devised an "emotional filing system" consisting of three categories: "Keeping Me Out of Jail" (alimony, traffic violations, IRS and other documents critically requiring response), "Keeping People Off My Back" (bills and reports), and "Me" (awards, newspaper clips, and other items of personal interest). She suggested a system based on anatomy to sort out the disarray in a doctor's office, including a "stomach" to digest information, a "brain" to make decisions about it, and a "liver" to remove waste. [...] While such clients rarely became paragons of organization, Kolberg found her techniques could keep them just ordered enough to avoid the sorts of small disasters they had been facing.
[Chapter 12, Pathological Mess, p. 275-277]
[...] Edward Hallowell, for example, has done pretty well with ADHD, which he has never outgrown. Now in his late fifties, Hallowell struggled with the disorder as a child, as well as with dyslexia -- there's a large overlap between the two -- but eventually became a strong student and went to Harvard. [...] getting his medical degree and becoming a Harvard Medical School professor. [...] His most recent [book ...] is "Delivered from Distraction", coauthored with John Ratey, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who also has ADHD.
Early in 2005, Hallowell and Ratey gave a talk [...] the two men took turns describing how the disorder's disorder, in spite of the heavy challenges it can present, can also be a real gift. "I wouldn't trade my ADD for anything," said Hallowell. "As far as I'm concerned, you all have attention surplus disorder." He went on to describe the ADHD mind as "a Ferrari with Chevrolet brakes," by which he meant that people with ADHD often seem to think more intensely and about more things than the rest of us, but with less control, "it shouldn't be called a 'deficit' of attention," he said. "It's a wandering of attention."
[Chapter 12, Pathological Mess, p. 279-280]
Part of the reason ADHD's mental messiness isn't always pathological is that there's a less-appreciated flip side to ADHD, namely a tendency to have that wandering focus sometimes latch on to a particular task or idea. This "hyperfocus" sets up a sort of scan-and-lock mode of thinking, in that someone with ADHD sometimes furiously samples various aspects of the world around her, suddenly zooming in on whatever seems most engaging. That can be a highly productive approach to solving a problem -- though it is not without its own problems. Denslow Brown says some of her ADHD clients sometimes grab on to a single task at work with such tenaciousness that they'll miss meetings, leading her to recommend that they set loud-ringing timers in front of them. Hallowell related the story of one patient of his, a poet who was making ends meet by driving a school bus. The man once drove his entire route without remembering to stop and let any of the small children off the bus -- but he was able to make considerable progress on a poem he had been thinking about all the while.
[Chapter 12, Pathological Mess, p. 280-281]

From The Moronic Inferno [and Other Visits to America] by Martin Amis (Penguin 1990):

On the telephone I arranged to meet the Nobel Laureate in the Chicago Arts Club at one o'clock. He would be identifiable, he cheerfully informed me, "by certain signs of decay". [...]
Our meeting took place in the fourth week of October 1983. [...]
Bellow is sixty-eight. His hair is white and peripheral but the eyes are still the colour of expensive snuff. Generous yet combative, the mouth is low-slung, combining with the arched brows to give his face an animated roundness. In repose the face is squarer, harder. He looks like an omniscient tortoise.
[Saul Bellow in Chicago, p. 199-201]
Many times in Bellow's novels we are reminded that "being human" isn't the automatic condition of every human being. Like freedom or sanity, it is not a given but a gift, a talent, an accomplishment, an objective. In achieving it, some will need more time or thought or help. And, put that way, it doesn't sound too hard a lesson to learn.
[Saul Bellow in Chicago, p. 208]

From Tales of Hi and Bye: Greeting and Parting Rituals Around the World by Torbjörn Lunndmark (Cambridge University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-11754-8)

In fact, what is often known as the 'Hitler salute' was used in the USA to hnour the Stars and Strips right up until 1942. Millions of American school children performed the salute to the flag every morning, as they made their Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States.
To see photographs of American school children doing the Nazi salute to the Star-Spangled Banner might seem horrifying to some, but that was the custom for 50 years or so. The practice late became known as the Bellamy Salute, after Francis Bellamy, who wrote (or at least claimed to have written) the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892.
[...] The Bellamy Salute, as it came to be known, was in fact not supposed to look like a Saluto Romano. It was a salute with a twist. Had the schools and other institutions performed the salute the way John Upham did it, with the hand flipped upwards, the embarrassing similarity with the Nazi salute would have been averted.
Perhaps because it felt awkward or unnatural, the heavenward palm was often forgotten and neglected, and in time, the salute had become identical to the Roman version.
By 1942, the Roman salute had become so associated with the Nazis and the Fascists and the atrocities in Europe that the practice was abandoned in the USA, and on 22 June that year, the current hand-over-heart stance was instituted by Congress. The new law, Public Law 829, was passed in December 1942.
[Gestures and Signals, p. 23]
The various hand greetings found in America are too numerous to describe or list here, but one relative of the fist bump and the high-five -- and a most spectacular greeting -- is perhaps word mentioning: the 'dap'.
[...] It must be understood that there is no one single dap, but countless variations. A particular dap works almost as a 'secret handshake'. It must be known completely by both greeters. It can comprise hand movements, dance steps, body bends, head rolls, sound effects, struts, lunges, dodges, knee-knocks and all manner of dynamic ingredients. The hand and finger movements are often digital acrobatics, incorporating slaps, flips, hits, grips, bumps, pulls, hooks, snatches, and flourishes of every imaginable kind.
Readers might have expected an instructional graphic or photograph on these pages, but there is none. It is pointless to try to illustrate a dap in line drawings or still pictures: the only way is to see it in real life or, perhaps even better, in slow-motion replay. Hands dash and flit like birds in the air; feet shuffle and tap; fingers touch and snap. A good dap is a wondrous display of human coordination. Those who can should look up the myriad clips available on the internet.
[Gestures and Signals, p. 74]
The Kanuri people of western Africa usually name their children after the children's grandparents. This causes a problem, because a Kanuri person is not allowed to say the names of his or her parents. Consequently, mum and dad can't call their kids by name. Kanuri sons and daughters are therefore often known as 'little father' and 'little mother'.
[Names & Addresses, p. 206]

From Right Hand, Left Hand : the Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, atoms and Cultures by Chris McManus (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002, ISBN 0-297-64597-8) [Notes from the book appear at http://www.righthandlefthand.com/]

[...] At a more prosaic level, many people feel it lucky to put on the right shoe first, but a Jewish custom makes this far more sophisticated, firstly putting on the right shoe but not tying it, then putting on and tying the left shoe, and finally tying the right shoe, ensuring one begins and ends on the right side.
[Chapter 2, Death and the Right Hand, p. 30-31]
From the notes on book's website: On putting on shoes, see Wile, I. S. Handedness: Right and left, Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1934 p.218 Wile, 1934 p.218. There is a strong parallel with an Islamic tradition,
"Allah's Apostle said, 'If you want to put on your shoes, put on the right shoe first; and if you want to take them off, take the left one first. Let the right shoe be the first to be put on and the last to be taken off.'" Sahih Bukhari, Volume 7, Book 72, Number 747: (http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/fundamentals/hadithsunnah/bukhari/072.sbt.html)
Right and left in Classical Greece applied at many levels, even including food. James Davidson has elegantly described how the Greeks not only distinguished between food and drink, but divided food into two very separate categories, the staple foods, sitos, such as bread and the relish or the flavour, opson, such as fish, meat or onion. Sitos was eaten with the left hand whereas opson was eaten with the right [...]
[Chapter 2, Death and the Right Hand, p. 33]
[A footnote gives the reference as Davidson, J. (1998) Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, London: Fontana, pp. 24, 44.
The Russian Imperial Army had such dificulty with its ill-educated, rural recruits not knowing left from right that to get them marching in step their drill instructors would tie a bundle of straw to the right ankle, a bundle of hay to the left, and shout, "Straw, hay, straw, hay, straw, hay."
[Footnote: The story is told by V. Fritsch (Left and Right in Science and Life, Barrie and Rockliff, London 1968), who attributes it to the German psychologist Kurt Elze, who in 1924 invented the term 'right-left-blindness' (Elze, 1924; Elze, 1926).]
The well-trained Roman armies may have had similar problms, since 'spear' meant right and 'shield' meant left.
[Footnote: In Paradise Lost, IV: 785, Milton describes the army of Cherubim, 'Half wheeling to the shield, half to the spear' (A. Fowler, Milton: Paradise Lost, Longman, London 1971).]
[Chapter 4, Kreiz, drept, luft, zeso, lijevi, prawy, p. 60]
Although, in theory, it might seem possible to have an effective, symmetric, centrally placed heart, in practice becoming more efficient also means becoming asymmetric. The heart is a machine for pumping liquid, and as fluid is pumped at a greater rate [the context is how animals supply more and more oxygen to tissues as body size increases], so the constraints of fluid dynamics - the ways in which liquids flow - begin to apply. What must be avoided is the disordered, erratic flow known as turbulence, because it wastes energy and also traumatises fragile red blood cells whic can cause blood to clot. As blood flows through the heart, it moves in a series of spirals that allow the streams of blood entering and leaving the heart to pass one another without colliding. Since spirals are chiral, being either right- or left-handed, hearts inevitably have to be asymmetric. [...]
[Footnote from website: A video of the blood flowing through the heart, showing the spiral movement, and models of the action of a symmetric and an asymmetric heart can be seen at www.nature.com (Kilner et al., Asymmetric redirection of flow through the heart, Letters to Nature, Nature 404, 759-761, 13 April 2000) Video viewable under the 'supplementary info' link ]
[Chapter 5, The Heart of the Dragon, p. 87]
Recently, though, fossil specimens have been uncovered in China which, at about 550 million years old, are the oldest known vertibrates. They show all the key identifying features of a vertebrate - a skull, gill slits, fin rays and a large heart - but they are also sufficiently primitive not to have jaws, as is also the case in a few living vertebrates. [Which living vertebrates have no jaws? -Fred]
[Footnote from website: An excellent and relatively accessible account of the evolution of vertebrates can be found in H. Gee, Before the Backbone: Views on the Origins of Vertebrates, Chapman and Hall, London 1996.]
[Chapter 5, The Heart of the Dragon, p. 88]
[...] The central dogma of molecular biology, which says that DNA produces RNA which produces proteins, has the corollary that since DNA only encodes L-amino acids and transfer-RNAs only carry L-amino acids, then proteins have to be made of L-amino acids. That is indeed true, but one needs to add the proviso that although proteins may come into the world made only of L-amino acids, they need not continue that way. If an organism finds it useful to replace an L-amino acid in a protein with a D-amino acid, then there is nothing in biology to stop it. In fact, that process is very common in bacteria and fungi, which have many proteins containing D-amino acids.
[Footnote from website: The rats kept in a germ-free environment actually have lower levels of D-amino acid oxidase and, by inference, of D-amino acids (D. A. Bender, Amino Acid Metabolism, 2nd edn, John Wiley, Chichester 1985). ]
[Footnote from website: Bacteria and fungi that include d-amino-acids in their proteins typically do so using so-called non-ribosomal peptide synthetases, which are huge molecules that act as dedicated assembly lines for these unusual proteins (which may also contain other things which cannot be synthesised in the usual DNA-RNA mechanisms). A good recent review can be found in J. Gewolb, (2002), "Working outside the protein-synthesis rules", Science, 295, 2205-2207.]
[Chapter 6, The Toad, Ugly and Venemous, p. 132]
... transcranial Doppler ultrasonography ... [the rhythm of those words is poetic -- Fred]
[Chapter 8, The Left Brain, the Right Brain and the Whole Brain, p. 200]
Apart from that one unreliable estimate concerning Old Testament Israel, there are no written data before the late nineteenth century. There are, however, other ingenious sources of evidence. [...] Stan Coren and Clare Porac [...] looked at paintings, drawings and sculptures in which a person used one hand or the other to carry out some skilled action, such as throwing a spear. They looked at over a thousand such pictures from a range of cultures, the earliest dating from before 3000 BC. [...] about eight percent used the left hand, a proportion remarkably similar to modern estimates of the rate of left-handedness. [...]
Handedness can also leave its traces in various artefacts. [...] A right-hander would [twist metal or metal wires] by using the left hand to hold one end firm while twisting the other end clockwise, using the powerful supinator muscles of the right forearm. The result, confusingly, is a lift-handed twist in the metal. [...] In a selection of torques, necklaces, bracelets, and domestic items such as bucket handles, forks and the like, dated between 1600 BC and 400 AD I found seventy-nine items with a left-handed spiral. Eight, however, have a right-handed spiral, slightly over ten per cent, the ancient left-handers thus having left a record of their existence.
Evidence of an earlier left-hander comes from Ötzi; the "man in the ice" who lvied about 3200 BC and died high in the Italian Alps. He was buried in the ice of a glacier, where he lay for over five thousand years until, on 19 September 1991, the ice melted sufficiently for his well-preserved body to be found. Amongst the artefacts he was carrying were [...] arrows in a quiver [...] the feathers at the tail of the arrow were held on by fletching, a thin cord wound around the shaft of the arrow. When right-handers fletch, they invariably wind in a left-handed spiral, as was the case with one of these arrows, but the other has a right-handed spiral, suggesting that it was made by a left-handed fletcher.
[...] Even if left-handers have been around for a long while, the majority of humans are right-handed and have been so for at least two million years [...] Several things suggest that Homo Habilis was right-handed. Like modern man, Homo Habilis had troubles with food getting stuck between the teeth, so an early invention was the toothpick, which, from the wear patterns found on teeth one and a half million years old, seem to have been mostly held in the right hand. [...]
Much better preserved are stone tools. [...] The anthropologist Nicholas Toth looked at [flint] chips from Koobi Fora, a site in Kenya dated to 1.8 million years ago, and found the chips were typical of those produced by right-handers, suggesting right-handedness was predominant.
[Chapter 9, Ehud, Son of Gera, p. 210-213]
In the early twelfth century, the Chinese emperor Hui Tsung commisioned his artists to paint a portrait of the peacocks in his garden. The emperor, however, shook his head when in the finished work he saw a peacock lifting its right foot to step on to a flower bed. "A peacock always raises its left foot first to climb," he said. Parrots similarly show left-footedness, and even domestic chicks prefer to scratch the ground with right foot. Some toads can show consistent asymmetries, [...] The mosquito fish prefers to detour to the left around objects [...] However, although some species of toads and fish show these asymmetries, other quite closely related species show no asymmetry at all, suggesting that such asymmetries are quite idiosyncratic. Asymmetries are not restricted to living species. In the floodplains of the South African Karoo, 240 million years ago, lived a mammal-like reptile, Diictodon, which looked something like a dachshund with a lizard's skin. It dug unusual helical burrows, some of which have been fossilised to produce a perfect cast known as a Devil's Corkscrew. As with corkscrews in general, the burrows are right-handed, suggestings that Diictodon was also asymmetric.
[Chapter 9, Ehud, Son of Gera, p. 215-216]
Occasionally, being left-handed is seen in some ways as a virtue - although it still remains a difference - there being, for instance, a Japanese proverb that a left-handed child may grow up to be a genius because of being different.
[I've managed to find no reference to any such proverb, hunting for kotowaza containing 左手, with no luck so far - Fred]
[Chapter 11, Keggie-hander, p. 270]
"Lefties Die Young" was the title of an editorial in the Guardian newspaper on 5 February 2001. [...] The myth began in 1998, when Psychologists Diane Halpern and Stan Coren published a brief paper in Nature suggesting that left-handers die younger than right-handers. They had looked at an encyclopedia of baseball players, which recorded the handedness of each player and their age at death, and found that the left-handers died at a younger age than the right-handers. A further paper by the same authors in 1991, in the New England Journal of Medicine, described a group of recently-deceased left-handers who had died at a younger age than a comparable group of right-handers. The findings were well-publicised, despite being entirely the result of a statistical artefact. Much of the problem is shown by the huge size of the supposed difference in lifespan of right- and left-handers - more than seven years. If correct, it would be the most substantial influence on human lifespan known to modern public health medicine, equivalent to smoking 120 cigarettes a day and swarfing everything else in preventative medicine. Somewhere there had to be an error.
The first thing to realise is that there is nothing wrong with the basic data - when they die, left-handers are indeed younger than right-handers. Paradoxically, however, that doesn't mean that left-handers have a lower life-expectancy than right-handers. The problem is a well-known one in epidemiology and is peculiar to studies known as "death cohorts", which take a group of people who died at the same time and look backwards at their lives. In contrast "birth cohort" studies, which are free of problems, take a group of people born at the same time and look forwards through their lives. Everyone in a birth cohort study has their twentieth, fortieth and sixtieth birthday on the same date, whereas in a death cohort their are large differences in the date when people have their birthdays. [...] Many things were very different seventy years ago, including society's attitudes to left-handedness. In Western societies, the proportion of leff-handers was much lower at the beginning of the twentieth century than at the end [...] On average, then, left-handers have been born later in the century than right-handers. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that left-handers who have recently died were born later in the century, and will thus appear to have died at a younger age. The problem of the death cohort is best seen if one looks not at the age of death in people who have just died, but instead at the current age of living people. Just as dead left-handers died younger than dead right-handers, so living left-handers are, on average, younger than living right-handers, the difference in age being precisely the same in each case. [...] To make the point more clearly, people who read Harry Potter books are younger than those who do not. Ask the relatives of a group of recently deceased people whether their loved one had read Harry Potter and inevitably one will find a younger age at death in the Harry Potter enthusiasts, but that is only because Harry Potter readers are younger overall. There is no need for a government health warning on the cover of Harry Potter books.
[Chapter 12, Vulgar Errors, p. 292-293]

From 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman (Pan Books, 2010, ISBN 9780330511605):

[On giving the perfect job interview]
[...] Despite the best of intentions and most extensive prepartions, we all make mistakes. Perhaps you will knock a glass of water into your lap, inadvertantly insult your interviewer or give an answer that is as bumbling as it is unconvincing. The fact is, you need to be able to cope with the odd unexpected answer or two. To help, Thomas Gilovich from Cornell University and his colleagues undertook a series of studies in which they forced people to wear Barry Manilow T-shirts.
[Chapter 2, Persuasion, p. 46]
[Chapter 4, Creativity, p. 140-141]

From It's Your Time You're Wasting: A Teacher's Tales of Classroom Hell by Frank Chalk (Random House Australia, 2008, ISBN 9781741666953):

I stand, arms folded, by the door. Speaking calmly, I say: "We are on nine minutes now. You know you have to be quiet before you go into my lessons. If it gets to 10 minutes, I will fetch your head of year and you will all do a half-hour detention." (No they won't, I think to myself).
"No we won't!" yells one boy, near the back of the line. "You can f*ck off!"
Is that kid telepathic?
No, he can't read books, let alone minds.
However, just in case, I form a mental image of me strangling him.
It seems to work: there's a moment of quiet.
Right, that'll do. Seize the moment, like a drowning man grasping at a passing branch.
"OK, in we go. Remember, coats on hooks." They like to keep their coats on at every opportunity, regardless of the ambient temperature, as they provide useful places to conceal things like crisps, phones and spliffs.
[p. 10-11]
Wayne counters with a comment every supply teacher must have heard: "How do you know? You're not a real teacher!"
Whenever a pupil suggests this, I wholeheartedly agree that I am no longer allowed to be a real teacher "due to an unfortunate incident." If I'm feeling mischievous, I like to add something vague along the lines of, "I have paid my debt to society and that it's all in the past and come along now Wayne, let's see that drawing finished by the end of the lesson." On this occasion, I don't bother gilding the lily.
[p. 228]

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