"And yet, on occasion we are reminded that in a most elemental way, one can begin to change the world through seemingly ordinary acts of empathy and magnanimity".
The album helped launch the singer-songwriter era of the 1970s and remains a touchstone for how empathy, ordinary language and minimal detail can produce the weight of an entire novel.
Ford displays great empathy for ordinary German citizens caught up in the carnage, and he briskly dramatizes the postwar revolt that gave birth to the Weimar Republic.
Mr Obama himself is increasingly, if unfairly, described as over-analytical and short of empathy with ordinary Americans struggling to cope with the economic downturn.
"But Tony's great gift: his insatiable curiosity about — and deep empathy for — ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances," Mr. Ghosh writes.
They all recognised his portraits of the mechanism of dictatorial rule, as well as appreciating his ease and empathy with ordinary people's lives.
All over the country, shoe-leather columnists became local celebrities when they wrote with wit and empathy about ordinary people and savaged the powerful.
These supply him with reservoirs of empathy for ordinary life, which he can draw on to make policy seem supple, and politics like a mechanism of human need rather than the maneuvering of interest groups.
These portrayed Mr Romney, a former private-equity boss, as an elitist, unpatriotic avatar for globalisation and the outsourcing of jobs, successfully driving down Mr Romney's poll ratings for likeability and empathy with ordinary folk.
The understated empathy of ordinary Britons, rarely reflected in the deportment of their nation's overweening ruling elites, is what Gandhi tapped into – and it is what Corbyn is tapping into.
Mr. Romney, who all year has allowed Democrats to define him as a rich son of privilege who wants to benefit his own kind but lacks empathy for ordinary people, seems to have broken free of that image.
