His insight is humbling, deeply grained, outrageously perceptive and full of a signature humour.
The chief economist at the BIS in the runup to the crisis was Bill White, who issued many a perceptive warning about the unsustainability of asset-price inflation at the time.
The BBC's managers were less perceptive than the great novelist.
Meticulously researched it offers perceptive insights into the reception of printed Shakespeare, his publishers and the early owners of Shakespeare's quarto playbooks.
This brought to mind a perceptive Bagehot column from the August 22nd 2009 issue, which said, "The Tory party, in fact, has for most of its history succeeded by eschewing systems and managing not to believe too strenuously in anything…In general, in Britain, the left has relied on visions of Utopia to get elected; the right has offered to run the place better".What, then, are you advocating?
He can over-interpret baffingly, but he can be acutely perceptive (take for example, his discussion of absent-mindedness and the unconscious in "To the Lighthouse").
He marshals Pound's staggering output of poetry, prose and correspondence to excellent effect, and offers clear, perceptive commentary on it.
When, in pursuit of colonial possessions, the Belgian king sent him a document expressing pious anti-slavery sentiments, Germany's perceptive chancellor scrawled a single word in the margins: "Schwindel".
By celebrating Zheng's exploits this week, China's leadership was reminding the perceptive not just that the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean were once a Chinese lake, or that Chinese naval technology once far outstripped that of the West, but that both these things may one day be true again.
A former correspondent in India for the Financial Times, he has written a perceptive, witty and readable book that will for some time be the definitive generalist's account of the country's recent political, economic and social development, and of its future prospects.
He may not be quite as perceptive as de Tocqueville, nor his book as masterly as its near-namesake.
