Over the next 44 minutes, he had vivid and unvarnished things to say about the North American Free Trade Agreement ("a total disaster") and the World Trade Organisation ("a catastrophe").
Yet the drugs turn out to be not hallucinogens or narcotics, but sodium pentathol, the "truth drug" – much as Welles's dark imaginings perhaps offer the unvarnished truth about things.
For a writer so insistent on an unvarnished apprehension of things as they are, Shriver often seems less concerned with the events that take place in her novels than with how her characters imagine, and mourn, the events that do not.
She was interrogated by the Gestapo, to whom she told the unvarnished truth: the whole thing had been her idea from the start.
Alastair Campbell offers the real thing — an unvarnished portrait of the players at the top of the British Labor Party as they sought to return to government in the 1990s after nearly two decades in opposition.
The Milbank piece, in its turn, arrived on the heels of Ed Luce's widely read FT article describing the ways in which the high-ranking officials who'd been with Obama since the campaign or longer – David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, Robert Gibbs – were maybe too enamored of the bossman to give him the unvarnished truth about some things, and weren't old Washington hands, were too in the bubble.
For performers there can be no such thing as an unvarnished truth.
However, I will tell the unvarnished truth about this whole thing and I will try to have some fun.
What Hillary was relinquishing, however, was in its way equally profound: in deference to her marital partnership and the local culture, she surrendered the notion that she could do things in her unvarnished way; and she set about repackaging herself — changing her name, her appearance, and her public demeanor.
At the same time, discussing it only within the boundaries of detached, unvarnished criticism feels wrong also it's a thing of beauty, that game, a living, olfactive piece of work that can't be described using simply journalism.
