And few spies are immune to financial gain, though their treachery may have begun on loftier ground.
Other artists of his generation had staked out loftier ground: Rauschenberg and Johns, for instance, laid claim to a certain high-brow legitimacy that for most of his life eluded Warhol, with his commercial-art pedigree and his Polaroid party souvenirs.
MF I'm not going to claim for Pret the lofty high ground, morally or gastronomically.
Now Obama aides are feeling all the more pressure to bring a lofty candidacy to ground level, showing that Mr. Obama grasps the concerns of everyday Americans.
But people like John Henrikson, a forester who's committed to farming 150 acres of trees in sustainable ways, help ground lofty policy ideas down in reality.
This, the novel's biggest weakness, is largely a failing of Mangan's prose, which tends to be general rather than specific, lofty rather than grounded, received rather than observed.
While dinner guests lingered upstairs, a crush of after-party guests jammed into the lofty space on the ground floor.
Like fog in San Francisco, Amazon continues to bring its lofty "cloud" down to ground level.
He is grounding his lofty rhetoric in the more prosaic language of white-working-class discontent, adjusting it to the less welcoming terrain of Pennsylvania.
