For those who know little about Turner's life, it's a jolt to accept that the creator of paintings of genius was a faulty bloke with an intermittently uncivil tongue, a tendency to grunt and a contradictory attitude towards women.
As Kingsley Amis put it: "The slightest and most banal coincidence or point of resemblance, or even just- perceptible absence of one, unworthy of a single grunt of interest, gets called 'ironical'ironical
My sharp-talking shotgunner steps up and outfoxes a none-too-bright grunt, and the tech takes advantage of his confusion to fix the radio tower and pick up a weird transmission or two.
That's his sense of it, they all need something from him, this pack of half-rich lawyers, dentists, soccer moms, and corporate VPs, they're all gnashing for a piece of a barely grown grunt making $14,800 a year".
Midway across I heard a grunt of heavy machinery.
I have long been a proponent of the idea that the true grunt work of keeping criminals away from airplanes takes place well offstage.
His ancestry also provided him with the solid support of one of the party's solidest non-elite constituencies, people who have done much of the party's grunt work, black America.His other trump card has been a talent for organisation.
Sadly, Mr Sharon has a longtime habit of drawing red herrings across his ever-expanding demands over these territories.Christopher LeadbeaterAshford, EnglandEradicating povertySIR - There is more intellectual grunt devoted to marketing a single new laundry product than there is to eradicating poverty in the third world ("Whatever it takes"), Economist.com, January 17th).
Manners are also a problem; one firm cited applicants who show up for interview in "scruffy track-suit bottoms and trainers, and grunt".In 1997 Tony Blair campaigned on a pledge of "education, education, education".
The arrival of one of these miracle-workers in a constituency risks giving harried candidates and disengaged activists the perfect opportunity to dump boring grunt work like canvassing and envelope-stuffing on the new recruit.
They get stuck with all the grunt work while their bosses swan around in the limelight.
