But alongside the reports and recommendations, we need a bit more action: some rebellious playfulness and public displays of wit and daring.
He immediately starts cracking jokes (then dissecting them with further displays of wit) and revelling in his own well-turned phrases, telling of nurse's uniforms making "a packety sound", "the quiet ambition of every homestead" and "a world of mistakes, of diametrical mistakes".
"What's a group noun for suitors?" asks Lady Rose in the new episode of Downton Abbey, in a rare display of wit.
In fact, it is astoundingly free of self-pity and characterized by that dazzling display of wit and wordplay that Wheatcroft acknowledges in his lead paragraph.
Sex Packets is an extraordinary album, an hour-long pyrotechnic display of wit, imagination, sleaze, pneumatic beats and sundry flavours of lyrical doolally.
But they did wash away memories of the heavy loss to Saracens a week ago with a display of wit and strength against the monotone offerings of the Irish; they did so, moreover, despite losing Dave Atwood and Anthony Watson to injury in the first 16 minutes.
He was book editor of The New Yorker magazine from 1933 to 1943, and from 1938 to 1948 he was master of ceremonies of the popular radio program Information Please, on which he and such panelists as Franklin P. Adams, John Kieran, and Oscar Levant used questions submitted by listeners as occasions for an entertaining display of wit and erudition.
In trying to regain popularity and keep the support of the real power in Iranian politics, the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, how useful to be able to shake his fist at the US, or to disarm US critics with a display of wit and quick thinking.
The character and the real woman meld in a show that displays plenty of wit but also real tenderness.
His father, he said, was an electronics-systems analyst who could light up a room with displays of erudition, wit and, often, bluster.
Will he or won't he? Block teases out the question thoughtfully, in displays of wry wit and philosophical double-think, and leaves Keller just where we want him: hanging from an existential cliff.
