Strange Birds, from the current Fire Within album, started the evening on a fragile, balladic note from which it rarely deviated.
Briefly released from a vitrine for our delectation are the fragile, handwritten notes for the Marquis de Sade's last erotic novel (all that survived the fastidious bonfire lit by the Marquis's scandalised son).
The reactor walls are quite fragile, he notes: "If the walls are too rigid, they can crack under the slightest pressure from inside so they have to be breakable because if the pressure is kept inside... it can damage the equipment inside so it needs to be allowed to escape.
The star lily's snow-white petals and the jewel-toned American rubyspot damselfly appear like fragile grace notes, while hikers may see spirited dance competitions among groups of male sharp-tailed grouse in April or May as they vie to impress a mate.
The composer dotted scenes with fragile piano notes and bolstered the film's ideas with recurring motifs.
Despite a fragile temperament, one notes his decency towards his slightly awful family, his love of companionship, and his wry tolerance of those who would do him down.
In some leaked slides, the NSA describes a lot of its programmes as "fragile", Dr Green notes, suggesting that it worries they can be thwarted without too much trouble.
It's very much a work in progress – "pause/play are fragile at best," notes its Google Play listing – but in the absence of Chromecast support in the official Spotify app, it may find a decent audience.
Reviewing The Fragile, critic Steve Cooper noted that the album juxtaposes widely varied genres, such as solo piano in "The Frail" and drum and bass elements in "Starfuckers, Inc".
When we focused on individual fragile sites, we noted the same trend, i.e. an average of 82 ± 8% decrease for FRA3B (P = 0.02).
