In a biography, he thought, the "minuteness of a famous person is grateful", or, as Scurr has him say, "minute details about a famous person should be gratefully recorded".
It is this death that we follow second by second inside Kamon's brain, until "the wafer of glass upon which his mind rested shattered, and thought burst from its reservoir like floodwater, travelling through the hollow package of his body in pursuit of pain".But Ms Scott's minuteness does not serve to smooth her characters' passage into an indifferent landscape.
With almost voyeuristic minuteness he has found out that when a body is deprived of water, the lips shrink as if amputated, the gums blacken, the nose withers to half its length, and the skin so contracts round the eyes as to prevent blinking.
Even formalist schools, which take for granted an author's freedom to shape his work according to the demands of art, treat individual lines of verse with a dogged minuteness that was previously unknown, hoping thereby to demonstrate the "organic" coherence of the poem.
They aimed at "truth to nature," which was to be achieved by minuteness of detail and painting from nature outdoors.
As late as the mid-19th century, bacteria were known only to a few experts and in a few forms as curiosities of the microscope, chiefly interesting for their minuteness and motility.
It relies for effect on simplicity of design, the motifs being limited in number and the excellence of the work being judged by the minuteness and evenness of the embroidery.
Its tiny scale — a fragment of Ireland torn from the blighted whole — reminds the visitor of the unviable minuteness of the lots that, when the potatoes rotted, left millions destitute.
The Spanish duet, the minuteness of whose bathing suits made them a favorite with the spectators, came in second.
And, by the middle of March, when the Moon is growing wan and rising later and later in the evening, you'll be able again — from the darkest places — to glimpse the uncanny depth of the stars, the uncanny minuteness of the planet we call home.
