But the overall impact highlights the novel's underlying themes: the hypocrisy of many but compassion of some; the way craven people get the callous rulers they deserve, yet now and then rise to a nobility that deserves better".Collaborators", a coruscating new play at the National Theatre, imagines a relationship between Stalin and Bulgakov himself.
"Red Riding", a trilogy of coruscating films in this mould, based on novels by David Peace and set partly in the 1970s, recently aired on Channel 4.Mr Peace also wrote the novel of "The Damned United", which like "Red Riding" sometimes imbues its drab surroundings with a certain melancholic grandeur.
Boris Johnson was in characteristically coruscating form the other night, addressing a crowd of the great and good (plus politicians and journalists) at a party to celebrate the 40th birthday of LBC, London's news radio station.
Every student, teacher, and acquaintance who enters through the frosted-glass door into Butley's stale world is little more than a feed for his coruscating voice.
* That essay, which ran in 1980, became a sensation, as coruscating denunciations of modernity so often do.
What I wasn't expecting, but also got, was an archipelago of coruscating sideswipes at the European and American colonists who had, by then, subjected much of the rest of pagan Polynesia to "civilization," a noxious brew mixing Christian piety with firearms, syphilis, and forced labor.
The film may be as close as Hollywood gets, outside the realm of Orson Welles, to a cinematic simulacrum of Shakespeare, less in its lucidly incisive, rhetorically reserved images than in its blend of coruscating language, rowdy comedy, and grand yet urgent and intimate performances.
With the popular, politically astute Mr Hawke presiding, and the coruscating, aggressive Mr Keating doing most of the pushing, this Labor government floated the Australian dollar, deregulated the financial system, abolished import quotas and cut tariffs.
In a coruscating note entitled "The night they killed Santa", he fretted that any pretence of fiscal probity had been discarded.
It was a coruscating book, painfully self-revelatory, brimming with a fierce, raw energy.
The Victorian gin palace was a church itself, equipped with coruscating lights and screens to dazzle the poor sodden souls who took refuge there.
