But he still remains a delicate talent just over a year into his professional career.
Robinho, of course, is not only a delicate talent but the personification, too, of the new owners' boundless ambitions for City, born of their limitless cash.
The man once known as Cartman had to purge his own raucous past, the wasted years of drinking and gorging that turned him into a cartoon figure of fun, hiding a delicate talent that only now, at 25 and 772 in the world rankings, has been let out of its cage.
There were even glimpses of Neymar's delicate talents but, as against England at Wembley, only glimpses.
The title story (also the first) is worth lingering over, because it's so appealing and funny, and because it displays in miniature Zambra's delicate talents.
Watching him play, you also get the sense – something you never get from Michael Clarke or Shane Watson, delicate talents with one eye already on the exit – that he doesn't want to do anything else with his life for a long, long time to come.
Carey's nuanced scepticism follows similar top-end grumblings from former winners AS Byatt and Graham Swift, as well as from critics who fear that the decision may see American fiction steamroller delicate new talent from smaller English-speaking nations.
Even more than Slaveykov, Petko Todorov, originator of the Bulgarian Romantic short story, believed that literature was sufficient unto itself; both in his Idilii (1908), prose poems inspired by folklore, and in several dramas based on Balkan mythology, notably Zidari (1906; "Masons"), is displayed his delicate poetic talent.
More than anything else, the book reveals Baldwin's immense will and professionalism; like the contemporary best-sellers "Ship of Fools" and "The Group," it suggests a delicate and fine-tuned talent pushed past its narrative limits in pursuit of the "big" work.
The more legendary the talent, the more delicate the endgame.
For BBC Worldwide, the broadcaster's commercial arm, basing a sales pitch on the presenting talent is a delicate business.
