Word: alastair
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...most of the author's large cast of characters are happily categorized. Chronicler Evelyn Waugh offers seedlings of his farces: "Alastair . . . at some stage in the evening lost my waistcoat. Audrey made declarations of love to me, and Richard to Elizabeth and I to Olivia. I do not think Black Torry seduced anyone." When Winston Churchill's son is operated on for a benign tumor, Waugh decides, "It was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove...
...luminous art nouveau bowls and vases and the early lamps chronicled by Alastair Duncan and Georges de Bartha in Glass by Galle (Abrams; 223 pages; $40) were often adorned with images of flowers, insects, birds, drawn from Galle's extensive nature studies, or abstractly patterned by pieces of colored glass. Jade, amber, even emeralds and sapphires were reproduced by adding metallic oxides and salts to molten glass. The designer went on to produce other decorative objects, including inlaid furniture, but Galle's reputation rests on glass works that were revolutionary in his time and still retain their ability...
...shortcut and sweeten material by merging people into composite characters, placing them in colorful circumstances or concocting pithy remarks. But such fabrications, however faithful they may seem to the spirit of a reporter's observations, are violations of the ethics of the craft. Thus, when New Yorker Writer Alastair Reid, 58, admitted last week that he had indulged repeatedly in such sleight of hand, he prompted a well-deserved storm of criticism, and an apology from the prestigious and generally scrupulous New Yorker. Said the magazine's editor, William Shawn: "He made a journalistic mistake...
When journalists hear journalists claim a "larger truth," they really ought to go for their pistols. The New Yorker's Alastair Reid said the holy words last week: "A reporter might take liberties with the factual circumstances to make the larger truth clear." O large, large truth. Apparently Mr. Reid believes that imposing a truth is the same as arriving at one. Illogically, he also seems to think that truths may be disclosed through lies. But his error is more fundamental still in assuming that large truth is the province of journalism in the first place. The business...
...people cannot rely on the news for facts, however, then journalism has no reason for being. Alastair Reid may have forgotten that the principal reason journalists exist in society is that people have a need to be informed of and comprehend the details of experience. "The right to know and the right to be are one," wrote Wallace Stevens in a poem about Ulysses. The need is basic, biological. In that sense, everyone is a journalist, seeking the knowledge of the times in order to grasp the character of the world, to survive in the world, perhaps to move...