Ellipses were followed by digressions to the point that one became embarrassingly convinced at times that these were psychotic ramblings".
Much of the poem is taken up by digressions occasioned by places or events of the journey, and it is in these that the attitudes and values of the poet and his circle find their clearest expression.
That's the overriding tone: chatty, informal, occasionally spiced by digressions that, echoing Homer's brilliant use of simile, seek humble parallels in contemporary life to the passions that inflamed the Greeks and Trojans.
6. Midnight in Sicily by Peter Robb Only partly about Sicily; more an exploration of the corrupt dynamics of Christian Democracy enlivened by digressions into the art, literature and gastronomy of the Mezzogiorno.
Inevitably, this timeline sometimes gets bent by digressions, which in turn means there's a risk of repetition, or catch-up writing, with some damage to the sense of narrative flow.
Braga's investigations ranged widely over the whole history of Portuguese literature, but, owing to his lack of a sense of proportion and his determination to fit the facts to his own sociological and philosophical theories, the valuable material he accumulated is often swamped by digressions and theorizings that have lost much of their validity.
Although "The Ascent of Money" is pockmarked by digressions (about things like the Black-Scholes model of options pricing) that many lay readers will find arcane and difficult to understand, the book as a whole is animated by Mr. Ferguson's narrative gifts, among them his ability to discuss complex ideas in user-friendly terms.
In "Turbulence," reviewed in the magazine this week, Meadows account of the war effort, told from a distance of forty years, is deeply felt but disrupted by digressions: "memories of an East African childhood, a damp domestic drama on the west coast of Scotland, the fated coastline of Normandy….
We are taken to the disused whaling station at Grytviken, where huge tanks and boilers lie rusting in the snow, but after only a few paragraphs we're swept away by digressions into Elgar, then to meet a first world war veteran who fought at Passchendaele, then to Marinetti and futurism, Nazi industrialisation, and so on, before being allowed back to the Antarctic.
His biography described Johnson's life, including previously unknown details about his writing career, but it was plagued by digressions into unrelated topics.
