15 Quotes by Francis Clines

Peter Utley, the newspaper's obituary editor cheerfully checked with Primrose Palmer, his assistant, on the day's soul traffic. The late archbishop from New Zealand sounded promising, it was agreed, but then again it was lunch time, and who knew what had been happening in some now-ending life.

If castaway cigar butts once were the floor symbol of the male-dominated convention, the equivalent symbol this year is a litter of women's pumps.

It is "lifestyle" journalism the way Chaucer first invented it, and the Times, onto a good thing, is uninhibitedly publishing articles on the passing of a cuckolded poet, a rock promoter strangely addicted to collecting orangutans and an Italian writer striving "to avoid becoming a bore.

The grand institution, at once hoary and ethereal, that some call Auntie and others call the Beeb, and that most, it seems, must call controversial.

Thus does the Beeb ease the English into another gray familiar day, another half-century of magic mystic rays.

Britain's gnawing hunger for retrospection is of Proustian proportions; historical confections of past glory are always being sugared up and nibbled at somewhere in the land.

At 5:30 the morning shift of commissary workers arrive to stock the coffee urns, bring in fresh food and prepare for the daylong job of feeding the humans.

Rosie's is as simple as a hubcap and as unpretentious as its own rice pudding.

Delegates crane their gaze at overhead screens. The producers, using fast-cutting close-up shots, have added the narcissistic touch of allowing delegates to watch themselves watch themselves at a convention of people watching them.