For all the intimate familiarity of that face and body, for all the willingness with which he showed me his framed photographs, his jelly-bean jar, and his view of the Hollywood Hills, I did not feel his presence beside me, only his absence.
Finding words to bridge that divide between the otherness of nature – a swift sleeping on the wing 5,000ft up, and the life-choosing immediacy, the intimate familiarity of the rush of wings past the face – is what most nature writers are striving to do, not wallow in some vanished pastoral world.
Recognizing the phenomenon of disappearing polymorphs and learning to overcome and control it requires a combination of considerable skill on the part of the chemist with the acquisition of an intimate familiarity with and understanding of the crystal chemistry of the compound in question.
The day ended at Steve's house, where I studied the pictures on his refrigerator and stood in the room where he spent his last months and died -- feeling a tinge uncomfortable, like I didn't deserve such intimate familiarity with parts of his life I hadn't known.
We live in an age when new musical sensations are processed so quickly that many people can claim intimate familiarity with the megalomania of the singer of Razorlight, or the fact that two-thirds of Keane are frightened of spiders, before even having heard one of their records.
More and more bosses realise that serious understanding of computer science and intimate familiarity with the potential of technology is a necessity for career progress".
At its strongest, her new book, "Farewell, Fred Voodoo," showcases all her formidable gifts as a reporter: her love of, and intimate familiarity with, Haiti; her sense of historical perspective; and her eye for the revealing detail.
"A jurisprudence capable of braving the overblown claims of national security must be forged in times of crisis by the sort of intimate familiarity with national security threats that tests their bases in fact, explores their relation to the exercise of civil freedom, and probes the limits of their compass".
There is today a restless, educated generation in Kashmir - most of whom were born after the armed militancy of the nineties - that has grown up in intimate familiarity with the use of digital technologies.
Others argue that Mr. Kissinger's intimate familiarity with the workings of the national security agencies make him uniquely qualified to pinpoint their shortcomings, whether under the Bush administration or under its predecessor, and fulfill his new commission's mandate to see if the government could have done more to try to avert last year's terrorist attacks.
My intimate familiarity with the worlds of black/white, foreign/national, academic/practitioner, etc., enables me to act as a bridge.
