The bully backed down before his steely gaze.

“Yes,” said Dick, with such a clinching period at the end that it seemed he was never going to add another word.

The two flat-screen monitors worked perfectly, on the other hand, affording a full-color, high-definition view of the first patient’s gallbladder, which Dr. Gawande and a surgical resident, Siva Raja, proceeded to remove laparoscopically, after first inserting a fiber-optic camera through a tiny incision in the patient’s abdomen.

The trains then still had smoking carriages, and I would sit in these because their passengers seemed the friendliest - and I would smoke in the smoking carriage, because it seemed the done thing.