Armed with a basket and a pointed stick, and wearing special hunting cloak and gloves, she would sniff her way round the wood, pausing here and there, her nostrils twitching, when she caught a whiff of her prey; then at last, with a deadly pounce, she would fall upon her victim, and poke his putrid carcass into her basket.
He introduced, if only for a moment, a twitch of dissent amidst the pomp.
He saw her resolve, and there was a twitch of alarm in his face.
Wouldn't nobody I know consider the ceremony's setup anywhere near lavish, and you'd think the meagerness alone would mean I'm cooler than cool, that my pulse is ticking off at a steady pace, but no such luck; my eyes are caught in twitching fits, and this heart of mine may as well be a twittering bird.
Miranda Richardson, with the help only of a subtle set of comedy dentures, was Elizabeth Mapp, and Anna Chancellor sublimely haughty as Emmeline "Lucia" Lucas: two women – ladies, actually, in a day when distinctions mattered as mattered life or death – caught in endless twitching frenzies of one-upmanship, all whispered eyebrows and quietly toxic putdowns.
Hanna Arendt, who covered the trial for the New Yorker, may have coined, for Eichmann, the phrase "the banality of evil", but in truth he was a deeply complex man, and very calculating in his denial, and it's notable that he only shows a brief twitch of emotion when caught out by the prosecution rather than when watching camp footage.
The result was a distracted twitch of a man.
The sutures were gently tightened until a brisk twitch of the left hind limb was observed.
