“I often characterize my days as: I get up and I get to work and I run as fast as I can all day long—and about 10 times a day I run smack into a brick wall, and it knocks me down on my rear end,” Platt says. “But every so often when I hit the wall, there’s a door there. And I get to run through the door. It only happens infrequently, but once you run through that door, it’s quite glorious.”
Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I
Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?
Oh! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave,
For I’m so fond of liberty,
That I cannot be a slave.
Twenty years ago the average chief executive of a FTSE 100 company earned 17 times the average employee’s pay; now it is more than 75 times.
Audiophiles have developed incredibly acute – some might say irrelevant – but certainly very impressive auditory skills. They can hear all kinds of details that the rest of us can’t. It’s as if they’ve taught themselves to become irritated by poor audio quality.
The industry is full of people who’ll go for a mechanism before they’ll go with instinct. We’re surrounded by Cambridge double firsts who are pointedly not using what they know. You just have to write with honesty. Emotional truth is the most powerful thing you’ve got.
How little we know, how eager to learn.
“I’m selfish. I’ve got all this,” he nods at the view that sweeps past a flank of Scottish scarp. “And I want to keep it. I don’t want to share it with anybody.”
“By trying to sing over the sound of the city, birds are risking vocal injury,” said Dr. Sue Anne Zollinger from the University of St Andrews. “This could have serious implications on how fit and attractive they’re perceived to be by females.”
Here she was abruptly at liberty, thin, exhausted, but full of life and humour, capable of a 20-minute speech of precision and wit and emotion and humility on the Tarmac of a Colombian air base on the outskirts of Bogota.