Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Moore

"There was hostility surrounding doing my job" is a masterclass in understatement that doubles as self-protection. Charles Moore doesn’t say people were hostile to him; he says hostility hovered "surrounding" the act of work itself, as if antagonism were atmospheric. That small grammatical sidestep matters. It softens the claim just enough to sound reasonable while still signaling that the environment was charged, politicized, or personally threatening.

As a writer, Moore is describing a condition that often attaches to the role: the expectation that your labor is never merely labor. Writing, especially when it intersects with power, becomes a proxy war. Readers, institutions, and rivals treat the production of words as an ideological act, not a craft. The line hints at the way modern public life turns professional function into moral theater: you’re not reporting, editing, or authoring; you’re taking a side.

The phrasing also suggests a particular kind of British reticence: grievance delivered in a low register, a complaint calibrated to avoid melodrama. That restraint is its own rhetorical strategy. It invites the audience to fill in the blanks (Who was hostile? Why? What stakes?) while keeping Moore above the fray, the put-upon professional merely trying to execute duties amid manufactured outrage.

Subtextually, it’s a bid for legitimacy: if hostility is "surrounding" the job, then the job must matter. In one line, Moore frames himself as both worker and target, the writer as someone whose desk has become a frontline.