“Honestly,” Nettie said, shaking her head again. “The lies people tell themselves and call it the truth.”
These wee Puffin Doctor Who ebooks are having a good run right now. Here we have the celebrated Patrick Ness, delivering a very solid tale of two marginal teenagers in wartime Maine, finding themselves dealing with a peculiar fad for truth-telling gadgets which turn out to be alien tech, with a mysterious celery-wearing stranger and his scandalously dressed companion all mixed up with it as well. This is the first of the books in this series which is not told from the tight narrative viewpoint of Doctor or companion, and all the better for it.
I have to say that’ I think the guidance given in the document on ‘cabinet’ is wrong. In the UK, a Minister’s “private office” will generally be from the civil service and chosen by the civil service. The system of a institutionalised group of political advisers who may or may not be career civil servants and are specially working for a senior political appointee is almost unknown in the UK and Ireland; the occasional fuss around ministerial “political advisers” demonstrates that they don’t have an obvious or comfortable place in the British administrative system.
I confess that I don’t know how many other countries have such an institutionalised role for political advisers. I do know that both French and Belgian government ministers have ‘cabinets’ in that sense. So its use in Brussels circles was not a historic lazy misuse, it was the adoption of the widely used French word for a concept which was not otherwise known in English. It’s unfortunate that the word also has a quite different meaning in the Westminster political dialect, but I can think of worse confusions (eg the different meanings of “to table” either side of the Atlantic).