With Marian's return to the clandestine world come Russian agents, atomic secrets and political and sexual seductions, all played out in the ruins of a continent scarred by the Holocaust and shadowed by the bomb, America a sort of presiding absence.
Rooftop rooms were a sort of urban and architectural "absence", a space of relative invisibility, originally conceived to hide servants from the life of the ruling classes, to conceal them from the rest of the city.
They seemed to be claiming that sort of absence of a backlash as a sort of back-to-front mandate.
He is a present absence, a sort of ghost of himself.
Some occupy more space than they might perhaps deserve – the presence of Paul Auster among fiction's innovators is a little puzzling – but all together conjure up a sort of literary smorgasbord surrounding the great absence, the author of Ulysses.
Though acknowledging the risk, some of those who go guardless said a change would amount to a sort of surrender, carried out in the absence of any tangible threat.
Gomis's vision of the vitality of Kinshasa life is balanced by his view of a land without infrastructure, a sort of African Wild West of governmental absence and official indifference amid the corruption that results from the sole power of private wealth.
In the absence of parliaments a sort of rolling dialogue has unfolded, whereby public anger builds at the lack of progress, resulting in protests that prompt interim governments to further concessions.
At some point, the absence of the album became a sort of presence.
