>Remember the old Hillaire Belloc jibe:
>
>You cannot bribe or twist, thank God!
>The British journalist
>But given what he'll unbribed do
>There isn't any reason to.
A pedant comments:
Usually it reads like this:
You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man can do unbribed, there's no occasion to.
And it's usually assigned to Humbert Wolfe, from "The Uncelestial City, Book I", though I haven't read it there myself.
(Were you confusing it with this verse of Belloc's, a favourite of Christopher Hitchens, from his poem on Lord Lundy: "The stocks were sold; the Press was squared / The Middle Class was quite prepared"?)
Chris --
Phone: +44 (0) 1865-286793 Email: <chris.brooke at magd.ox.ac.uk> Web: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368