Francis Clines Quotations

If castaway cigar butts once were the floor symbol of the male-dominated convention, the equivalent symbol this year is a litter of women's pumps.

It is "lifestyle" journalism the way Chaucer first invented it, and the Times, onto a good thing, is uninhibitedly publishing articles on the passing of a cuckolded poet, a rock promoter strangely addicted to collecting orangutans and an Italian writer striving "to avoid becoming a bore.

At 5:30 the morning shift of commissary workers arrive to stock the coffee urns, bring in fresh food and prepare for the daylong job of feeding the humans.

He sits at the kitchen table, which is the only authentic way to touch down at home in Queens.

The earnest weatherman is even more hilarious than in America because his forecasts of change are even more unchanging, and his wondrous maps are always pocked with countless rain cloud symbols that seem permanently rooted across the beloved isle.

A show of police force worthy of a banana republic is the latest attraction on the cobbled streets of Georgetown.

The grand institution, at once hoary and ethereal, that some call Auntie and others call the Beeb, and that most, it seems, must call controversial.

Delegates crane their gaze at overhead screens. The producers, using fast-cutting close-up shots, have added the narcissistic touch of allowing delegates to watch themselves watch themselves at a convention of people watching them.

Rosie's is as simple as a hubcap and as unpretentious as its own rice pudding.

Thus does the Beeb ease the English into another gray familiar day, another half-century of magic mystic rays.