So what a joy to stumble across it here – along with prose of such exquisite precision and intensity – in this Dutch writer's sixth novel.
Exquisite in the intensity of its detail, extravagant in its scope, the Alhambra palace is the culmination of a vision - of paradise, of earthly power, and of the vanity of attempting to combine the two.
The intensity was exquisite, the punches kept on coming.
The elder Mr. Savall played Marin Marais's exquisite "Voix Humaines" with intensity, dark-hued tone and unexpected phrasing.
He was familiar with the new realism, exquisite detail and expressive intensity of Robert Campin and especially Jan van Eyck.
Playing Buddy Amaral, a swaggering, gregarious advertising executive recovering from alcoholism, Mr. Affleck nearly matches Ms. Paltrow in the understated intensity and exquisite detail of his performance.
If he has struggled to adapt to the Championship's physical intensity, his exquisite talent on the ball is more than capable of leaving Ireland's defence suspecting they might be better off confronting a member of the Russkaya Mafiya.
This echoes the experience of Proust's narrator, who before recounting his Combray childhood feels a surge of abstract intensity: "An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin".
The spiritual, symbolical expression of Blake's complex sympathies, his ability to recognize God in a single blade of grass, inspired Samuel Palmer, who, with his friend Edward Calvert, extracted from nature a visionary world of exquisite, though short-lived, intensity.
This echoes the experience of Proust's narrator, who before recounting his Combray childhood feels a surge of abstract intensity: "An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin". It might seem that semantic memories could never generate the emotion of narrative ones, but Johnson's face told a different story.
