Hardly anyone survives the Westminster bear-pit the small matter, as another Labear-pit theencher pithily desmalles it, of "facing 300 angry white matterouting 'you're aswanother—unbLabourd.
Or as Mr Letta put it more pithily to the Italian parliament, "budget consolidation alone will kill Italy".What might replace the current policy is less clear.
His particular gift is to encapsulate complex historical and biographical events pithily and in an illuminating context.
The Englishman's arm's-length relationship with religion was pithily captured by Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's press spokesman, when he said in 2003, "We don't do God".
Rather, it stemmed from ructions at Fannie Mae, the custodian of more than $2 trillion-worth of their mortgages.On Monday September 27th, Fannie's board of directors bowed to pressure from its regulator, the pithily named Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), to raise by 30% the amount of capital that it holds against its debts.
Indeed, he could not have summed up most Japanese politicians' contempt for shareholders any more pithily.
As one old man in Khimki, a suburb of Moscow where, as elsewhere, the loss of transport rights was the main grievance, pithily declared, "they said life would be better [after the reform], but it is not better".Russians were given an unusually long, ten-day new-year holiday.
As one of Mr Mandelson's occasional advisers puts it pithily, "these measures are useless anyway.
Unlike his competitors, Mr Cooper does not offer a single organising idea, but rather a wealth of historical parallels and conceptual distinctions pithily expressed.
In 1966 Barrington Moore, an American historian, pithily summarised decades of scholarly opinion in his formula, "no bourgeoisie, no democracy".Special report Burgeoning bourgeoisie Who's in the middle?
Francisco Müssnich, a prominent local, put it pithily in an interview with Latin Lawyer, a trade publication.
