There is a grain of acutely observed truth in even the smallest details: the judge's attention to those radiators becomes a barometer of his agility.
In Bakewell itself, it's definitely a pudding, the name by which it was apparently known until the 20th century, though, as Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food observes, truth be told it's "more of a tart", wherever it's baked.
For decades, the response to global climate change was expected to look much like the response to the ozone hole: scientists would make predictions and support them with observations, and the world, prompted by those observed truths, would agree on a solution similar to the Montreal Protocol, the international agreement on C.F.C.s that was originally signed in 1987.
His TV show currently exists in a genre all by itself; bittersweet vignettes shot through with self-deprecation and acutely observed truths that also manage to be bladder-burstingly funny.
You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data, capture the free social data generated by user interaction, push commercial forces into areas of data production that were non-commercial before, mine the existing data for predictive value – always and everywhere ensuring nobody but the corporation can utilise the results.
One man who observed the truth up close, four years before the Khmer Rouge came to power, was a French ethnologist called François Bizot.
Strauss himself observes the truth of this, but only in the context of trying to deny that sargers actually hate women.
The extent of our greed precludes mentioning them all, but almost every one confirmed the seemingly obvious, yet seldom observed, culinary truth that there's almost nothing better than wonderful basic ingredients cooked simply and accurately.
And yet, as Simon Blackburn observes in "Truth: A Guide" (Oxford; $25), the "brand-name" Anglophone philosophers of the past fifty years — Wittgenstein, W. V. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty — have developed powerful arguments that seem to undermine the commonsense notion of truth as agreement with reality.
