An emigrant returned home from America and took revenge on his old rival. That was the first phase. Then the second: the emigrant turned into a woman, the multibillionairess, Claire Zachanassian.

So this was my future home, I thought! Certainly it made a brave picture. I had seen similar ones fired-in on many a Heidelberg stein. Backed by towering hills, […] a sky of palest Gobelin flecked with fat, fleecy little clouds, it in truth looked a dear little city; the city of one's dreams.

By this standard, Tracy Kidder's book is not too cobby.

[…] with a life-destroying, hideous article clumsily stuck before the personified noun to unpersonify it, to make masculine what should be feminine, […]