There's a Nabokov quote, I can't quite remember how he said it so I'll put it badly: You don't convey how horrific a situation is, how tragic, unless you convey how funny it is too".
"I feel – how to put it – I feel badly that he was not convicted.
So when cities, counties and states wake up to discover that they're going broke paying ever-escalating salaries, benefits and pension payments to members of government employee unions, and then try to correct the problem, the unions can, to put it mildly, react badly.
Congress hasn't updated the fine structure for businesses behaving badly, to put it another way.
When you do these things, you are stealing lots of money from innocent people, and you are, in fact, behaving badly (to put it mildly).
Innocent Bystander Willing Participant Chardonnay, Yarra Valley, Victoria, Australia 2012 (£11.99, Tesco) There are still a lot of wine drinkers who are, as one merchant put it to me, "badly scarred" by their encounters with the big, badass Australian chardonnays of yore.
"Waffle," as one frontbencher put it to me, "and badly written as well".
"He continues to feel badly, but he's put it behind him and he is moving forward," he said.
He promised no extra help, offering only to put badly behaving local authority freeholders "on watch".
We believe that significant technical changes affecting legal liability in the proposed bill will jeopardize the ability to put badly needed money into these declining properties.
To be overpaid for your first book, the argument goes, is to put yourself so badly in debt to the publisher that you become doubly mortgaged.
