In his speech yesterday, Pratchett tilted at JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, which is considered a more respectable work of fantasy than his.
The book started with "Apollinaire" and ended with "Zandomeneghi" and was a highly respectable work of scholarship compiled by some 30 renowned specialists, the latest word on 100 years of art history.
"And Justice for All" is a respectable work that too often feels like an obligation, a requirement, on the part of the author as well as the reader.
Journalists find it difficult to think of a legitimate reason that anyone who had not already lapsed into the dubious career of politics would give up respectable work (or a life of leisure) for a job that requires being polite to strangers, compromising with idiots and reading your every unguarded remark in tabloid headlines.
A few years later, with a respectable body of work under my belt, I finally understood that the ability to imagine and then build where nothing had existed before was an ability worth valuing.
Seeping deeper and deeper into the subsoil of proletarian life, down below the "respectable" working class of miners and mechanics and canal boat-men, frightened observers reported a "mighty current of passion and hate" sweeping up a "vast swarm of vicious idlers, vagrants, and tramps".
This respectable work required getting up at 6 a.m., not good for a carouser.
So you invested a respectable amount of hours working out this year.
And although still young, its permanent collection features works by a respectable range of contemporary artists, including Francesco Clemente, William Kentridge and Gerhard Richter.
The detective novel began as a respectable branch of literature with works like Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), Dickens' unfinished Edwin Drood (1870), and Wilkie Collins' Moonstone (1868) and Woman in White (1860).
