Above all, a critic should be kind when they can.
These characters may talk in clichés, especially the unprintable kind, when they get into tight spots, but then, so do actual people.
"Such words as 'desperate' ought not to be used about the position in a battle of this kind when they are false," the great man said.
"What is now important is that we persuade all Olympic athletes, all over the world, to do a salute of some kind when they win a medal," he said.
But the whole point of pay-for-performance compensation plans is that executives should do well when their investors do, and should suffer the consequences in kind when they don't.
Blackburn Rovers manager Steve Kean and his Bolton Wanderers counterpart Owen Coyle will be under pressure of the most severe kind when they meet at Ewood Park on Tuesday.
The Talmud offers this famous response: "Those who are kind when they should be cruel will end up being cruel when they should be kind".
Our friends, our families, our books, our cultural responses, are most useful, most loving and kind, when they help those in grief to carry their reality, and least helpful when they try to solve what can't be fixed.
Once you start down this path, you're left, as the Democratic Party, saying, Any gesture that we make to return to the regular order we know is not going to met in kind when they're back in power.
Just last week he and his wife had a first encounter of the gossip kind when they were hi-jacked for 90 seconds by a brain-free tabloid show at an airport.
