Gordon distils the remarkable and at times unbelievable events of the last few months that have seen Iris Robinson, the first minister's wife, disgraced over her affair with her young lover and the loan she secured for him and Mr Robinson publicly humiliated over the betrayal and the ongoing allegations concerning the couple and their relationship with a number of multimillionaire builders.
The form functions in a similar way to poetry in that it usually distils and condenses rather than embellishes, creates snapshots rather than fully fledged narratives and moves more swiftly towards closure.
Everyone knows the musical and the film; we're perfoming a new arrangement by Iain Farrington that distils the music down to a slightly smaller chamber orchestra, meaning that we can recapture some of the vitality and virtuousity of Bernstein's original Broadway pit-band score.
Vin & Sprit, the Swedish firm that distils Absolut Vodka, made the most recent overture.
In a recent paper* Anton Korinek of the University of Maryland distils the lessons of research spurred by recent emerging-market crises to explain how cross-border investment can lead to financial instability.
Despite the ersatz homeyness on the labels, many are made by big firms: Jim Beam, for instance, distils and bottles expensive brands such as Knob Creek, Basil Hayden's and Booker's.
Andrea Leadsom, the only Tory woman on Parliament's Treasury Select Committee, distils her working life into the phrase: "listening to blokes in suits while sitting among blokes in suits".The growing unfashionability of political parties, from which the Tories suffer particularly, makes this harder to overturn.
The video distils the Sisyphean concept into an intellectually stimulating five minutes.Some of Mr Alÿs's videos, particularly his hand-drawn animation loops, are made in small editions of four (plus two artist's proofs).
Elias Fadel distils just 1,000 bottles a year for the exclusive use of his family's restaurant, Fadel, which is set on a pine-forested ridge above the town of Bikfaya.
Those looking for something more authoritative might be interested in the annual Social Attitudes Survey, which distils the responses of over 80,000 people to a variety of questions on politics, economics and society.The most recent, based on interviews in 2008, was published on January 26th.
His first story collection, "The Elephant" (1957, translated 2010 by Konrad Syrop), distils the absurd realities of his time.An ideal foil to Solzhenitsyn's forensic tomes, these three-page tales mix paranoia with oblique plotting and mordant wit.
