In stories such as t zero and The Night Driver (1967) he goes astonishingly far, stripping out character and plot yet retaining narrative momentum.
For all his feints, traps and compromises, the chancellor has so far stripped the public sector of 600,000 jobs, capped welfare and overseen, in a downturn, historic growth in private-sector employment.
That was the kind of talk with which ITV's well-chosen panel of pundits, who have barely put a foot wrong in the tournament so far, stripped away our illusions before the match against Georgia on Sunday.
Also contentious is the question of how far stripping the FSA of its overall responsibility for food policy to divide it instead between three different government departments weakened it and contributed to the horsemeat scandal.
Almost all these examples involve women and, as commenters have rightly pointed out, Sunday's brief flash of male full-frontal nudity in War and Peace (following a flash of men's bottoms in an earlier episode) doesn't begin to even out the number of women who have so far stripped in the series.
But none of the high-ranking holders of fraudulent academic titles has so far been stripped of his academic degree, let alone resigned.
Far from stripping commanders of accountability, as some critics have suggested, removing prosecution decisions in sexual assault and other serious crimes from the chain of command would not undermine discipline or end commanders' responsibility to set the proper climate.
"So close, yet so far," the strip of sea that lies between Cuba and the United States seems to say.
Mr. Lopez worries that the city will still insist on moving the merchants to a far-off strip of storefronts.
But Bachmann was speaking to the lore of the far right, which strips the founding fathers of their raw, fallible humanity and ignores the fact that, in some ways, we're wiser.
In a gated Las Vegas community not far from the Strip, Don King, Alexander's promoter, owns a house.
