He suspected, also, that it wasn't Strauss who'd raised it but the inquisitors in front of him.
Democrats are looking to the example of John Roberts, the eerily calm nominee, who mastered "the law school equivalent of Greenspan-speak, the art of saying virtually nothing in the most expansive language possible".So the fate of Barack Obama's nominee depends on the relative ability of her and her inquisitors to avoid flipping out.
The question is one of several that Senator Chuck Schumer, one of the Democrats' chief inquisitors, has promised to put to John Roberts, George Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court, when the Senate starts grilling him on September 6th.
Mr Brown heaped blame on Kathleen Blanco, Louisiana's governor, and another Democrat, New Orleans's mayor, Ray Nagin.That went down well with his Republican inquisitors.
The inquisitors, typically retired and articulate, asked the assembled politicians including a Conservative cabinet minister and a serving and former Labour MP to make a "positive case" for keeping the 307-year-old union intact.
And there have already been four Iraq inquiries, though none as comprehensive as this one.Some reckon its failure to unearth masses of new information is down to a mix of mendacious reticence on the part of key witnesses and the pusillanimity of their inquisitors.
TO MOST Western ears, the very idea of punishing heresy conjures up a time four or five centuries ago, when Spanish inquisitors terrorised dissenters with the rack and Russian tsars would burn alive whole communities of ultra-traditionalist Old Believers.
OUTSIDERS like to decry Poland's ruling twins, sometimes as buffoons, sometimes as bloodthirsty inquisitors.
The ministers and political staff at the Department for Work and Pensions are rapidly becoming some of the fiercest inquisitors.
Among the beneficiaries, Mr Jefferson charged, were two of the inquisitors facing him on the ethics panel.
In the 1950s, McCarthy and his inquisitors trampled the free expression of left-wing views; and so for the next two decades or so it was essential to defend the principle of free speech at every opportunity.
