Sublime

That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy rel

But without a name, things get lost. The image, however, is clear.

Bill Walsh (who I’ve described exclusively as my personal hero since first picking up a copy of his essential text The Elephants of Style: A Trunkload of Tips on the Big Issues and Gray Areas of Contemporary American English

Isn’t that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period? “Hello,” he says, without turning his