Social media blurs interpretation between accusation and conviction

It’s one of life’s great pleasures, listening to ideas with which you profoundly disagree, writes Terry Prone

PEGGY NOONAN was Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter, producing some breathtaking speeches for the US president, including the one crafted within minutes of the Challenger disaster. One of the best of my purchases and gifts over Christmas was a fat Hachette paperback of her columns from The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.

Because they go back over a couple of decades, the collection of columns illustrates a point about non-fiction which contradicts the demands we make of fiction writers. We require playwrights and novelists to develop their characters over time. To present them as deepened and altered by the realities of life. This plays to our ineradicable (but groundless) belief in the improvability of the human race.