Compare the logic of those nameless bankers with the arguments of Judt or Parry-Jones, which are underpinned with a sense of responsibility that goes beyond self-interest and dissembling.
Notwithstanding that Australia had been, um, settled for 60,000 years, it's quite a feat of dissembling to substitute occupation with investment.
Or was she dissembling ("solidly there"?) in order to win social conservatives?
WHEN history comes to write the tale of the euro-zone crisis, the chief villains, if Europe's leaders have any say, will be not dissembling Greeks or dithering Germans, but the financial markets.
"TREACHERY, dissembling, promising, lying, falsehood, etc," Henry Fielding wrote in 1745, are "summed up in the collective name of policy, of politics, or rather pollitricks".
But it is the refuseniks—from probably honourable Brazil and Egypt to dissembling Iran and Syria that most concern inspectors.And there is the nub of the problem.
His fans hope that he may be dissembling.
How tiny kindnesses matter a lot in survival, and how forgetting, ignoring or simply dissembling helps people get over the effects of war, whether victor or vanquished".The Narrow Road to the Deep North" was the book Mr Flanagan was born to write.
That said, perhaps these politicians get so many gold stars for being direct precisely because most of their colleagues are always dissembling furiously.
The chilling Brother/Sister by Sean Olin (Razor Bill Penguin, £9.99) is narrated alternately by Asheley and Will, each of whom, we eventually realise, are being interrogated by Californian police about a series of murders, and there is no dissembling.
"The one thing I was not doing was dissembling in that position.
