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The loop at the end had a single broken reed still attached.

As Chernow writes, the Massachusetts congressman Ben Butler, a Radical Republican, “wondered privately whether Grant can be trusted to disobey positive orders of his chief? When the hour of peril comes, shall we not be leaning on a broken reed?”

This would perhaps have been an injustice given the ease with which Wilfred Zaha tumbled like broken reed under Raheem Sterling’s challenge.

It is conceivable that if Wyeth were still alive and painting, he would be drawn to this new-old landscape to capture the stark beauty of a broken reed or the isolation of the Webb farmhouse and its sugar maple.

But we soon found that we were trusting to a broken reed, so far as his knowledge as a guide was concerned.