The unique element characterising his work is its cohesiveness: a quality that marks intrinsically the work of a painter, a composer; an innate lyricism (in his case) against which occasionally he struggled in attempting to express the epic nature of his subject.
The headlong tonal swings and crushing musical contrasts that characterise his work are prised from the score with just a few, low-key, incisive words or a typically elliptical comment: "This opera is unplayable, unshapeable and unsingable," he told the Rotterdam Philharmonic during rehearsals for Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini, "right, I'll see you all at 7 o' clock".
Bloodaxe Books, which published the anthology, expressed an interest, and O'Brien's first collection, The Indoor Park, came out in 1983, winning a Somerset Maugham award, and setting up many of the concerns and motifs - rain, railways, the urban-pastoral - that would come to characterise his work.
Easily his most accessible work, The House of Hunger is clear-sighted, beautifully observed and far removed from the sometimes histrionic solipsism that characterised his subsequent work.
He painted with the concern for structure and surface that had characterised his earlier work.
During the last decade of his life, Marx's health declined and he became incapable of the sustained effort that had characterised his previous work.
Better to allow director Bennett Miller to tell this stranger-than-fiction story with the same engaging intelligence that characterised his previous works, Capote and Moneyball, both of which drew career-best performances from their casts.
Lucian Freud characterised his own early work as the result of "maximum observation by staring at my subject matter".
The raised middle digit features in some of Ai's pieces, illustrating the mix of the weighty and the witty that characterises his work.
