Whoever said "Wagner's music isn't as bad as it sounds" was as wrong as he was funny, but there is surely a case for saying that the story of Captain… - Clive James

[B]y now some of the editors and subeditors [on Fleet Street] are themselves products of the anti-educational orthodoxy by which expressiveness counts above precision. It would, if the two terms were separable. But they aren't. Beyond a certain point - and that point is reached early - precision is what expressiveness depends on.

People don't get their morality from their reading matter: they bring their morality to it.

Probably it is only in free countries, however, that a humorous regard for corruption is possible. In the totalitarian countries, corrupt from top to bottom, nobody is laughing because nothing is laughable. There is no difference between what things are and what things ought to be, since what things ought to be no longer exists even as a standard.