Excerpts from
By Jonathan Lynn and Anthony
Jay
‘Certain informal discussions
have taken place, involving a full and frank exchange of views, out of which
there arose a series of proposals which on examination proved to indicate
certain promising lines of enquiry which when pursued led to the realisation
that the alternative courses of action might in fact, in certain circumstances,
be susceptible of discreet modification, in one way or another, leading to
a reappraisal of the original areas of difference and pointing the way to
encouraging possibilities of significant compromise and co-operation which
if bilaterally implemented with appropriate give and take on bath sides could
if the climate were right have a reasonable possibility at the end of the
day of leading, rightly or wrongly, to a mutually satisfactory conclusion.’
'Could you summarise this
please?' I asked.
He thought hard for a moment.
'We did a deal,' he replied.
(Power to the People, p. 402-403)
‘Yes, it was the one question
today to which I could give a simple, clear, straightforward, honest answer.’
‘Unfortunately, although
the answer was indeed simple, clear and straightforward, there is some difficulty
in justifiably assigning to it the fourth of the epithets you applied to
the statement inasmuch as the precise correlation between the information
you communicated and the facts insofar as they can be determined and demonstrated
is such as to cause epistemological problems of sufficient magnitude to lay
upon the logical and semantic resources of the English language a heavier
burden than they can reasonably be requested to bear.
‘Could you give me a translation?’
‘You told a lie.’
(The Tangled Web, p. 409-411)