"Have you heard the record?" he asks keenly.
There was rueful laughter when Pat Nixon — a keenly expressive Janis Kelly — asked her hosts whether an ornamental glass elephant was "one of a kind".
One has only to read such 19th-century classics as Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad (1869) to be reminded of just how long, and just how keenly, Americans have asked themselves if all the stained glass and sacred music of European culture is all it is cracked up to be, and if the tall tales and Cigar-Store Indians did not have more juice and life in them for a new people in a new land.
Once a researcher and now working for the Human Frontier Science Program Organization (HFSPO), I am often asked, especially by young scientists keenly embarking on a research career, how I ended up working for an international funding agency.
"No, not at all," Roloson, the Tampa Bay Lightning goalie, said after being asked if he appreciated being in the playoffs more keenly at 41. "Doesn't matter if you're 10 or 50 or 100.
If you had asked people whose lives Sartre changed why they admired him so keenly, they would have said that it was because in his book "Being and Nothingness," and in the famous 1945 speech "Existentialism Is a Humanism," he had reconciled Marxism and existentialism.
Nedrow asked the jury if it was possible that Bonds, who Nedrow said was paid $17 million annually to be keenly in tune with his body, could be taking performance-enhancing drugs without knowing it.
There may, of course, have been slights that I did not notice, or avoided being aware of – I have never been asked to play Cassius in a production of Julius Caesar, for example – but I have not felt the loss keenly.
Then the loose continuity kicked in when I was asked to join the editorial board of Modern Painters and I found myself sitting beside him – curious but not overwhelmed, evidently – keenly scrutinising this other latest recruit to the masthead.
Though everyone I spoke with in the village appeared keenly aware of the corrosive effects of violence — "This will kill the children," Manal said, "to think about hatred and revenge" — they resented being asked to forswear bloodshed when it was so routinely visited upon them.
