Sleep Jerusalem (1999) A neat lesson in how to create a cult following in one easy step.
A short walk around the Barbès district in northern Paris, where almost all of these nationalities are represented in the same tiny, overcrowded space, provides both a vivid snapshot of the diversity of this population and a neat lesson in French colonial history The Gare du Nord, at the heart of this district, is frontier territory.
"False Future" is both a neat grammar lesson and a parallel story of the birth of cinema.
Each chapter delivers a neat little lesson about the perils of being "bound for the sharp end of the pyramid," which is a flattering concept no matter how archly the author uses that phrase.
Today it's more than a little stale, not because it's written in the Victorian mode, with all the pretentious-sounding formal locutions of the day and with a complicated plot that untangles according to a neat and instructive moral lesson.
They are pretty good on the facts as well: Anders Lustgarten's performance lecture, The Fat Man, is a savagely neat little economics lesson that explains how 85% of the Greek bailout went straight back to the banks.
If our stories are too neat and the moral lessons too sentimental, we end up, all too often, succumbing to hubris.
Most critics have focused on how this neat device teaches difficult lessons in emotional maturity, most notably how you can't be happy all the time and that sadness has its role to play too.
The "Star Wars" films, like Tolkien's books, are surely epic rather than fairy, with a neat morality and the overriding lesson that blood (Luke Skywalker's or Aragorn's) will always tell. C. S. Lewis's Narnia tales uneasily mix an optimistic Christian morality with a darker and more intuitive pagan one.
Every writer, of every political flavor, has some neat historical analogy, or mini-lesson, with which to preface an argument for why we ought to bomb these guys or side with those guys against the guys we were bombing before.
High-school chemistry lessons, with their neat equations transforming, say, 2H₂ + O₂ into 2H₂O, miss out a plethora of intermediate steps such as (in this case) the formation of hydroxyl, OH.
