Sublime

You could argue, quite correctly, that in all of these examples, whether commercial or literary, the ellipsis is completely unnecessary – and you would be right. These sentences would stand alone well enough without them. But, as Stephen Fry says of swearing being criticised as ‘unnecessary’: ‘It’s not necessary to have coloured socks. It’s not nec

I am always impressed by a well-written menu, one that is informative and appetizing without slipping into pretentious nonsense. Here, for example, is a London restaurant’s attempt to justify the exorbitant price of its whitebait: “The tiny fresh fish are tossed by our chef for a few fleeting seconds into a bath of boiling oil, and then removed bef

To point out other people’s errors was a duty that Mr Bulstrode rarely shrank from,

Umberto Eco derided ellipses’ ‘ghastliness’, and Elena Ferrante wrote recently that she had given up using them because she felt that nothing, in life or writing, should be left unsaid (although she does acknowledge how visually and metaphorically pleasing they are, ‘like stepping stones, the sort that stick out of the water and are a risky pleasur

One of my favourite blurb descriptions of a character is of Count Fosco in The Woman in White: ‘who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison’. No need for a ‘sinister’ at all there. Another is on Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, which tells us that a young woman in a boarding house ‘pecks at spam and mashed potato by night’,

And the example of corporate gobbledyspeak on page ix is priceless. Beginning with the last paragraph on page 16