In a long, moving passage, Paul Bryant tries to find the subject of Cecil's poem, and almost fails.
It is a homecoming that almost fails to happen when a plummeting swan causes a minor collision.
This slender novel by the Italian writer Simona Vinci plunges with such stylistic quiet into forbidden territory that one almost fails to hear the barriers collapsing.
This, like the book's title, is an irony so obvious that it almost fails to be ironic at all, but that doesn't necessarily scuttle Minot's project.
On Uefa's numerical record of events he almost fails to register, a ghost player draped in his own invisibility cloak of continual peripheral motion.
The metaphor — as similitude — almost "fails," but it is blazingly successful in the context of the poem's address to a young man who has not yet "lain with a woman".
Thinks... is a book that appears to be big on ideas, and almost fails for its excess of them, but that ultimately succeeds for all the usual fictional reasons.
Although investments of R&D by government and firms have enlarged and the amount of patents has increased rapidly, R&D almost fails to commercialize for various reasons.
