Operating in the shadows of ill intent, its agents were referred to by many names: spies, saboteurs, commandos, Baker Street Irregulars, and Churchill’s Secret Army. Indeed, they were spies, but the role of Baker Street was not one of spymaster—that was MI6’s field—but to be masters of mayhem.
My main task in editing is to work on assonance, consonance, and meter. It’s not enough simply to convey information, even though this is a nonfiction book. Beautiful prose should not be limited to literary fiction, but the problem is that the research required for scholarly nonfiction takes up so much time that the writing itself often suffers. I wrote a blog article about this, by the way, in my Goodreads review of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
In the last sentence of the highlighted quote, notice the effect of the consonants “s” and “m.”
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