Who said put lipstick on a pig

You know you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. You know you can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it's still going to stink after eight years. We've had enough of the same old thing. The crowd erupted in applause when Obama delivered the line. The Illinois senator then praised both McCain's "compelling story" and Palin's "interesting story," and said his "hat goes off" to anyone who's looking after five kids -- "I've got two and they tire Michelle and me out.

Within minutes, the McCain campaign announced a conference call focused on the remark, which they said was a deliberate reference to Palin's line: "You know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Palin used the line in the opening remarks of her convention speech, and she frequently uses it on the campaign trail.

In Iowa last October, McCain drew comparisons between Hillary Clinton's current health care plan and the one she championed in "I think they put some lipstick on the pig, but it's still a pig. Obama was referring to [Alaska] Gov. Sarah Palin. It's obviously disrespectful and offensive. It was obvious. The crowd went crazy because of it. It wasn't the first time Obama used the line. In a phone interview with The Washington Post last September, he used it in reference to the situation in Iraq.

Petraeus, and he has done his best to try to figure out how to put lipstick on a pig. Other politicians have also used the phrase in recent years, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington state, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Sen. In the wake of the much-aired joke Palin had made about herself during her speech to the Republican convention last week - "What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull?

Lipstick" - it seemed clear to some that the Democrat was slinging insults at his rival. Except he wasn't. The "lipstick on a pig" phrase is a fairly commonly used American idiom of long standing, indicating an attempt to jazz up some old goods with a cosmetic tweak. Obama's remarks came in the context of a longer attack on McCain's attempt to position himself as a force for change in Washington. The fuller quote from the Virginia meeting goes, "That's not change.

That's just calling the same thing something different. Are they in fact underpaid? Barristers tend to be lumped together in the public imagination, but the reality is that they are far from a single breed. In the more visible but less glamorous world of crime, the view at the top is also relatively rosy.

But the story is different at the junior end of the profession. Add the endless stints of work experience or "mini-pupillages", shadowing judges and pro bono work that are now becoming requisite at the competitive entry level, not to mention compulsory "dining" - a tradition rebranded as "qualifying sessions", but which essentially requires trainee barristers to don a gown and dine 12 times in one of the four Inns of Court.

Once qualified, barristers, who are self-employed, have to contend with non-payment for months and sometimes years. Afua Hirsch. It's part of every Booker jury's job to announce a Big Idea which the rest of us can tear to shreds. The chairman, Michael Portillo, duly obliged on Tuesday with: "We have brought you fun," while the novelist Louise Doughty added: "The ability to come up with a good plot and create a good structure are great literary qualities - it is not just about how to make a finely turned sentence.

It was clear from the inclusion of Tom Rob Smith's thriller Child 44 on the longlist that plot was going to play a part in this year's deliberations - for thrillers are the most plot-heavy of all literary genres, and are very rarely considered for literary prizes. Some writers - notably the Booker-winning John Banville - have even contrived alter egos to accommodate the belief that genre fiction has a different engine to the one that drives the "literary" novel.

Insofar as plot is what carries fiction from one chapter to the next, every novel has to have one, though plenty of writers have toyed with eliminating them.