"Policing is never done; it's always unfinished business," Mr. Bratton said, speaking last in a kind of valedictory address.
He had taken this job partly to escape the shame of having his last novel, "A Kind of Pause," turned down by twelve publishers.
After being mined on and off for centuries, the Portland Brownstone Quarries, the very last of a kind, closed down this year, and by the end of this month, the quarry's final scraps of inventory should be gone.
He receives Billy's last words as a kind of benediction, redeeming him at the last.
The "Last Supper" is a kind of meaning machine.
His last phase was a kind of inventory of his mind, among the most interesting anyone has ever known.
All this adds up, Last writes, to a "kind of reverse Darwinism where the traditional markers of success make one less likely to reproduce".
Nor that Frank O'Hara's poem "The Day Lady Died" — a great 20th-century elegy, full of life in death and death in life, though not a "last look" — is a kind of presiding stylistic absence.
Although the soldiers and the guests mingle warily, there is no mistaking the celebration for what it is: a last hurrah for a kind of social mobility and political freedom that may never return.
