First place goes to Jennifer Leslie, a biologist at MIT, for her superb description of a session about using neuroscience in the courtroom.
Lyn MacDonald's books on the first world war set the standard for a generation, and Catherine Merridale's superb description of life in the Red Army, Ivan's War, is unlikely to be equalled.
In 1861, Tolstoy himself went to hear Dickens read A Christmas Carol in London – and maybe the superb description of Scrooge's horrified vision of everyone's utter indifference to his death, at a Christmas yet to come, planted a seed for the opening chapters of The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
In "Guinea," the story of an Italian-American soldier and his comrade, an Irishman from Boston, lost with a dying Japanese prisoner in tow, Murray provides this superb description of the foliage: "It was late October -- fall -- but in New Guinea things were green.
The last section of "Solo" brims with superb descriptions of folk music and the drunken talk of men and women who are brought together, then driven apart, by the fall of Communism.
Klein is a superb reporter, and his descriptions of the machinations required by these two very different engagements provide a thoroughgoing liberal education in millennial governance.
Ovid's hexameters in the Metamorphoses are a superb vehicle for rapid narrative and description.
And even when a menu description is accurate, as with a superb cold appetizer called beef tendon, the dish may sound strange.
Description of the label, which said: "A superb quality whiskey of excellent character and distinction, produced by the American Distilling Co. with almost half a century of experience in the distillation of Fine American Whiskies".
The description accompanying Lot 49315 at Heritage Auctions in May was striking: a "superb Tyrannosaurus skeleton," a remnant of a vanished animal that "ruled the food chain of the ancient flood plains that are today's Gobi Desert".
