I continued to note the parallels between our professions, for these judgments were like short stories, or novellas; the background to some dispute or dilemma crisply summarised, characters drawn with quick strokes, the story distributed across several points of view and, towards its end, some sympathy extended towards those whom, ultimately, the narrative would not favour.
Instead of hiding behind a first-person character-narrator or cultivating a Flaubertian "impersonality" Spark's authorial voice was up front, briskly summarising the characters and their actions, and shifting the temporal focus of the story - not with the deliberation of Conrad or Ford, but at dizzying speed, from present to past to future and back again, sometimes in a single paragraph.
June and Leon, the seventysomething couple from Liverpool, are essentially the adoptive grandparents to the nation, thanks in part to Leon's skill at summarising the character of pundits and politicians ("Well, he's a dickhead").
If your investment thesis can't be summarised in 140 characters, you're being too prescriptive.
The Guardian is pretty relaxed about swearing, but there is a line in the first 10 minutes of the show that's too rude even for here, and which might delicately be summarised as a character's suggestion that God, in his cruelty, be penetrated in every orifice, with an itemised list of what that entails.
Aishwarya Rai's character was summarised as Catwoman, a female fictional comic book femme fatale or anti-hero.
The common critical consensus of HCE's fixed character is summarised by Bishop as being "an older Protestant male, of Scandinavian lineage, connected with the pubkeeping business somewhere in the neighbourhood of Chapelizod, who has a wife, a daughter, and two sons".
Its app promises more than 1,000 stories a day, summarised (by humans) into 300-character stories, linking to the original sources.
One blogger neatly summarised the objections to the character, saying she "is the crystallisation of a thousand misogynist myths and fears about female behaviour.
Cause of death was available as a four-character code using the International Classification of Diseases 10th revision (ICD-10); we summarised these to the standard three-character groupings for analysis.
Davies summarised the relationship between the two characters as "soul mates" who "understand and complement each other".
