He talks with passionate enthusiasm about Carlo Emilio Gadda, whose Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, 1957) he describes without hesitation as the "greatest Italian novel of the 20th century".
At one point, his character, somewhat randomly, says that he always imagined that his real parents were gymnasts, whom he describes without a trace of irony or mean-spiritedness as "these really nice, smiley thin people who were just always springing".
He wanted a handshake with the person he described without any evident irony as "the great man".
He described, without emotion, color codes used to determine how much medical attention victims received before they were evacuated.
Yes, he described without parallel a certain Ireland - provincial, priest-dominated, impoverished, hard-drinking, secretive, generous, collusive - at a certain time: after independence but before modernisation or prosperity or (a key factor in numerous stories) contraception.
Johnson has irreverently described the global leaders who drafted the Paris treaty as driven by "a primitive fear" that warmer weather was caused by humanity – a fear that he described as "without foundation".
But he is also the leader of the Communist Revolutionary League, and in a long interview here, in party offices above a printing factory in this racially mixed city just east of Paris — where cheap clothing stores abut shops selling North African and Middle Eastern spices and take-out food — he describes himself without blushing as a revolutionary.
Rawls dismissed much of Kant's dualism, arguing that the structure of Kantian ethics, once reformulated, is clearer without it—he described this as one of the goals of A Theory of Justice.
He describes it as "Yelp without the fuss" and the goal is to basically make top 10 lists of everything everywhere.
He describes play as activity without a particular goal, just noticing how something works or does not, combining things on a whim and often ending up with nothing in particular, throwing it out, and playing in a different way.
He describes a New Age martini without alcohol, but that recipe is another mystery.
