Looking at this coin, I'm aware of the astonishing Empire stretching from Hadrian's Wall to Libya, and Palestine to Portugal, but I can also see the girl or her brother who dropped it.
An eye-popper and brain-boggler, "Razzle Dazzle" is also, remarkably, a thing to stir the soul, delivering in its final stretch an astonishing, unexpected political jolt that elevates what appeared to be a mere (if marvelous) formal triumph into a shattering confrontation.
One observer counted an astonishing 30,000 birds along a stretch of Suffolk coast less than three miles long.
The funerals of African-American notables have a tendency to stretch out — the astonishing service, in Charleston, for the Reverend Clementa Pinckney went more than four hours; the service for Rosa Parks, in 2005, went nearly seven — but not this one.
This is an astonishing compendium of related tales, stretching over dozens of decades in the invented history of Mars.
Instead, a year later he released Astral Weeks, an album of astonishing originality and inventiveness that stretched the frontier of rock music.
The poetic justice of his action is expressed in an astonishing visual image: desperate arms stretching up from under the weight of his retribution.
Seen from above, the Iraqi capital is an astonishing sight, its squat buildings stretching for miles in each direction, an ocean of mud bricks broken by the pale green of date palms and the garbage in the streets.
Anyone hoping for a chronological hop through Young's triumphs – the astonishing run of albums that stretches from 1969's Everybody Knows This is Nowhere to 1979's Rust Never Sleeps, the supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, his early 90s resurgence, borne by the alt-rock scene his music inspired – is going to go home very disappointed indeed.
But a team of Chinese and U.S. researchers now proposes that writing in China went through a long, slow evolution that stretches back an astonishing 8000 years.
