Indeed Homage is a great book. I cannot recall it without thinking of Frank Capa’s amazing photograph from the Spanish Civil War of a soldier in full flight charging head with rifle but struck dead by a bullet. I also like Down and Out in London and Paris along with Road to Wigan Pier as great stories about the 1930s. What is so strong in his writing is power to evoke feeling from simple verbs and nouns. We need to learn as Harold Evans, iconoclastic editor of The Times in the 1960s urged “strike out meaningless modifiers”. Most verbs work fine without the baggage of adverbs.