Sentence examples for its whiff from inspiring English sources

It seems likely that he gave the character the name, that he indeed knew Joyce's masterwork when it was still banned here, and likely that he valued it all the more for its whiff of the illicit.

IF the supporting characters provide little more than scenery, the book's milieu is irresistible, and with its whiff of noir, Ridley's style complements it well.

Her later fiction (she died in 1989) became almost Dostoyevskian in the mood it cultivated of the ax hanging over, in its whiff of damnation, but with no representatives of the saved and no possibility of redemption.

Ever since Theodore Roszak first coined it in 1968, the word "counterculture" has retained its whiff of patchouli, its association with free love, long hair and left-wing youth.

In the 1920s the Chinese backdrop gave Maugham's story its whiff of exoticism (if not for Chinese readers); these days it's the overwrought bedroom panting, the social reserve and Kitty's apparent lack of choices that seem so foreign, like dispatches from some dying planet.

Its whiff of predestination chafes the scientific mind.

With its whiffs of occult practice and brow-furrowed calculation, that title could apply to Mr. Gilmore's entire body of work.

Perhaps it's no coincidence that New York's drinking zeitgeist has passed, in succession, from the Belle Epoque-ish wine bar to the pre-crash Jazz Age cocktail lounge, to the Weimar-flavored biergarten, with its whiffs of hyperinflation and the Munich Beer Hall Putsch.

The work, though, retains its miasmatic whiff and its unending ability to disorient and wrong-foot viewers.

How can it be otherwise, with its overpowering whiff of school truancy, its tacky-trashy air of a misspent youth?

It struck me as a safe move for HP, especially after it whiffed so profoundly with its ill-fated TouchPad.