Two years ago, Niall Ferguson's much-publicised divorce drew down upon him the kind of fake moral disapproval combined with salacious and intrusive comment usually reserved for footballers or soap-opera stars.
This announcement did nothing to stem the flow of intrusive remarks, including comments about her weight gain, forced the family to prematurely announce the pregnancy and later feel compelled to announce their miscarriage.
More recently, Jonathan Coe's Like a Fiery Elephant, about the avant-garde novelist BS Johnson, deploys a range of tricks – meandering footnotes, choruses of comments, an intrusive and sometimes indolent narrator – which would be recognisable to readers of the novels of BS Johnson.
Though he illustrates the point with a comment about intrusive uses of cell phones in public spaces (2005, 47), the rise of mobile social networking has amplified this concern by several factors.
It was the waiter's helpful comments -- not intrusive or show-offish -- that added a personal quality to our dining experience.
The BBC received more than 120 complaints about the show and the corporation's governing body, the BBC Trust, ruled that the panellists' comments were "personal, intrusive and demeaning".
They find the commentary intrusive.
Coetzee would not normally be thought of as a "Jamesian" writer – if he has one master it has usually seemed to be Dostoevsky, almost James's polar opposite – yet the intrusive presence of Hadley's comment surely says something not so much about Coetzee's subject-matter or sensibility as about the kind of critical alertness to "technique" needed to do justice to his best writing.
The state high court said Nelson was entitled to a new trial on his sentence because the death verdict had been tainted by "the intrusive influence" of the trial court's questions and comments.
His comments came as Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's president, said intrusive foreign military operations in Afghan communities were exacerbating the threat from the Taliban.
