The voice of Herbert Zimmermann changed from matter-of-fact description to high excitement.
The sudden death of a young man in "Train Dreams", deriving power from its matter-of-fact description, recalls Tolstoy's "Alyosha the Pot".
What was most harrowing was Hamilton's matter-of-fact description of a culture of enervation — "that so many people hate it with a passion and don't leave".
The matter-of-fact description of farm life, peppered by Rosie's droll voice, makes it clear that eking out a living in rural 19th-century Illinois was hard and unending.
Crawford describes her abject childhood; as Davis listens with shocked empathy, she gives a matter-of-fact description of how she lost her "cherry," at the age of eleven, to her beloved stepfather.
Noujain Mustaffa's shy laugh and excited optimism – and her matter-of-fact description of the terror of civil war – had already made her stand out amid the media coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis.
That matter-of-fact description of bomb-making for beginners was offered by Najibullah Zazi on Wednesday during a federal terrorism trial, in which he gave a detailed explanation of the steps he said that he and two other men had taken to carry out suicide attacks on New York subways on the orders of Al Qaeda.
Clarke's re-creation of the hermetic world of college life is spot-on, and his narrator's matter-of-fact descriptions of the outlandish fraternity rites — broken glass to kneel on, a goat in red lingerie — are more disturbing than the invented notion of ghostly possession.
What would she have made of my first book, with its matter-of-fact descriptions of the way that I and so many of the gay men I know have lived the endless talk of wanting boyfriends, of finding a "real" relationship, and the late nights spent hooking up online?
When Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Confessions" appeared, shocking the salons of eighteenth-century Paris with matter-of-fact descriptions of the author's masturbation and masochism, Edmund Burke lamented the "new sort of glory" the eminent philosophe was getting "from bringing hardily to light the obscure and vulgar vices, which we know may sometimes be blended with eminent talents".
What would she have made of my first book, with its matter-of-fact descriptions of the way that I and so many of the gay men I know have lived — the endless talk of wanting boyfriends, of finding a "real" relationship, and the late nights spent hooking up online?
