She's always been unhappy, he thinks, and her daughter's death has become "one more pretext".
Inward-turning and secretive, Joseph shies from intimacy; his festering shame over Rebecca makes one more pretext for isolation.
Since then, his titanic spins on exalted subjects (medieval philosophy, the Kabbalah, the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann) have seemed more pretext than passion.
Elsewhere, there is a fair amount of great dancing in choreography for which the story is more pretext than motive, and with little of the inner conflict that flamenco can dramatise so effectively.
Over the last 10 years Mr. Hogan and Ms. Higgins have become powerful enough to add more incentive to reunions, by booking bands for several festivals within a five-month span, and a little more pretext, by asking those bands to play a single album in proper sequence.
These polished performances keep the laughs coming even when the creaky plot provides little more than pretext for the characters' self-created histrionics.
They and others described a pattern of professional meetings that were little more than thin pretexts for sexual advances on young actresses and models.
Ayatollah Khamenei said the protest was nothing more than a pretext to disturb the peace.
That was more than enough pretext to allow the FBI to do what they long wanted: arrest Brown.
It hasn't happened yet, but the idea is clear: increasingly, baseball is the pretext more than the focus.
