I spake to the polis, an' they laff at me, begob.

Thus traditional Chinese socio-political values and too rigid an adherence to Marxist-Leninist dogma are seen as impediments to economic progress.

She had the strangest sense that the City was, simultaneously, both perfectly normal and dismissably unbelievable.

Sometimes a writer will establish the set-back by a brief use of the pluterperfect, and then slide undetected, he hopes— into the past again.