His 1964 book, My Years with General Motors, is a cool explanation of how he did it ("management has been my specialisation," he wrote flatly).
In this discussion - which is quite distinct from his account of "gene-selfishness" – he writes flatly that "we are born selfish" – we ourselves, not the genes.
In late August 1974, Major General John E Murray, whose job it was to maintain the supplies the South Vietnamese army needed to function, wrote flatly that "without proper support the RVNAF (Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces) are going lose, maybe not next week, or next month, but after the year they are going to".
The book is rather flatly written for the first quarter, in short, plain sentences, and there is little of Roth's usual fastidious attention to small detail.
The surprising thing about "Smash" was that a show meant to capture the magic of live theater could be so lifeless: flatly written, with a creeping sanctimoniousness and a middlebrow sensibility that seemed to reflect Hollywood's idea of what would please a Wednesday matinee audience.
"While J. K. Rowling's books about the boy wizard seem increasingly derivative, formulaic, flatly written and ridiculously long, Pullman's magnificent 'His Dark Materials' trilogy offers both hours of spellbound wonder and sudden moments of deep emotion that cut at the heart like the subtlest of knives," Mr. Spencer wrote.
The rest of Kluger's story -- two years in occupied postwar Germany, her years in New York City as a Hunter College student, her subsequent career as a teacher of German literature -- is flatly written and seems anticlimactic after the high drama of the war years.
Few suggested that "Katharine the Great" was a first-rate book, or even a solid one — it was flatly written and salted with highly suspect, even paranoid, material — but one had to wonder if Mr. Jovanovich would have done the same for anyone else.
Though the most lyrical passages in Mr. Naipaul's otherwise flatly written letters attest to his nostalgia for home ("I long for the nights that fall blackly, suddenly, without warning," he writes his father. "I long for a violent shower of rain at night"), he remains contemptuous of Trinidad as one of those countries he would later describe as "half-made" societies "doomed to remain half-made".
Flatly written and seeming more like a very extended bit of pedestrian patter by two ordinary presenters, the only good thing was it was mercifully short.
