Its best things are its least pretentious features: narrative range and, far too unusual in the theatre, thriller drive.
Perhaps surprisingly, this has been less for quotidian texture – journalists assume that the reader knows what it is like to walk down the high street, go to a football match or wait in the GP's surgery – but more for narrative range and on-the-ground opinions and attitudes.
Its revolutionary cinematography, editing, narrative range, battle scenes and sprawling cast mesmerized audiences and inspired generations of filmmakers.
It was first published twelve years ago, and the narrative ranges back to the fifties, but the themes endure: a cryptographer, a secret department, a disappearance.
The action of the narrative ranges from Manchuria in 1934, and the Korean War, in 1950, to New York City in 1986, and, finally, Italy.
The narrative ranges from destitute Tanzanian villages to the Golden Gate Bridge, but the bulk of the story takes place among the chattering, moneyed classes of London, where power resides more with those who write the headlines than with those who make them.
Having extended their influence at the expense of purely earthly powers, the theocrats had an interest in keeping geopolitical tension on the boil.Although Mr Holland's narrative ranges in a spectacular way from Greenland to Baghdad, taking in Córdoba and Sicily, one defining moment (in a story that might also have been called "The Uses of Apocalypse") occurs in 1077, at Canossa in northern Italy.
De Botton's narrative ranges back and forth in time and place, from the Parthenon to Japanese ryokan to the arid, modernist slabs of Le Corbusier (who once scolded a client, "Home life today is being paralyzed by the deplorable notion that we must have furniture").
Her narratives range widely enough to offer a view of the most recent Balkan tragedy that is at once sharply focused and panoramic.
rb2inGlasgow called it: A brilliant piece of post-Katrina reportage that traces the city's recent history through nine interwoven narratives ranging from a Mardi Gras Indian to a city cop, transsexual barkeep, and Carnival king.
The length of the narratives ranged between 1-2 handwritten pages, which were all transcribed verbatim.
