Her gift reveals itself at the oddest times: when a love vanishes, when a parent is frail, when a dark February lingers too long.
She was small, almost frail, intensely pretty, with dark eyes and scant eyebrows and a musical voice with a surprising accent, a hint of Cockney, which was unusual in a woman at university in those days.
Carey Mulligan carries with her gracefully the Daisy from Louisville days, making the past seem truly present, young and frail still, with the "dark shining hair" Gatsby first kissed now clearly dyed blonde (a perfect touch).
Justice and redemption are both, at best, frail defences against humanity's darker reaches.
The three of them bent together over the insect, whose frail folded wings were transparent and dark-veined.
And finally there was Jane Eyre, frail and formidable amid a stormscape of dark romance and gothic peril.
James died at seventy-two, atd athehendnd of his life he was wizened and frail, but he still had the luxuriant dark hair of a matinée idol.
ON DARK evenings in late 1916, a frail 76-year-old man could often be seen shuffling furtively between The Dove, a pub in west London, and the green and gold turrets of Hammersmith Bridge.
He wears a dark suit and flashy tie and looks frail but bursting with accomplishment.
But the sight of the frail pope speaking with such strong feeling in the dark hall, where the names of death camps are etched into the black floor, had its own resonance.
