You Can Spin Stories Out Of The

By Measuring Individual Human Worth, The Novelist Reveals The Full Enormity Of The State

Briony Began To Understand The Chasm That Lay Between An Idea And Its Execution.

But How To Do Feelings? All Very Well To Write "she Felt Sad", Or Describe What A Sad Person Might Do, But What Of Sadness Itself, How Was That Put Across So It Could Be Felt In All Its Lowering Immediacy? Even Harder Was The Threat, Or The Confusion Of Feeling Contradictory Things.

All This Happiness On Display Is Suspect... If They Think - And They Could Be Right - That Continued Torture And Summary Executions, Ethnic Cleansing And Occasional Genocide Are Preferable To An Invasion, They Should Be Sombre In Their View.

In A Language As Idiomatically Stressed As English, Opportunities For Misreadings Are Bound To Arise. By A Mere Backward Movement Of Stress, A Verb Can Become A Noun, An Act A Thing. To Refuse, To Insist On Saying No To What You Believe Is Wrong, Becomes At A Stroke Refuse, An Insurmountable Pile Of Garbage.