Don't just sit there like a lump.

“I have met old people who held my hands and told me tearfully that they preferred to die early,” wrote a township Party secretary, Li Changping, “and I have seen the sad sight of children kneeling before me saying they want to attend school.” In Li’s Qipan, also in Jianli County, society is failing because of the decline of agriculture. Li wrote a direct plea to Zhu Rongji about conditions in his area. That was futile because the well-intentioned Zhu has little power in Qipan and most other places in the countryside.

If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; and anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for.

The corporation had just opened its new cattle market in Islington, and it had plans for clearances in the Fleet Valley that would make way for the new Farringdon Road, and adjacent meat market.