A friend of mine, a keen observer of all things political, once observed of a later generation of Labour politicians that "they all looked like they'd been head boy".
"She chews snuff," he observed of a mother who worked with her two boys in a Georgia mill.
"The famous brows beetled, the melancholy gray eyes bored in, the doom-laden voice set out the words one by one, like great marble blocks," the writer Michael Kernan observed of a typical Teller performance.
"The dark hole in the floor," Rebecca West observed of a toilet in old Serbia on her extraordinary 1930s journey through Yugoslavia, "made it seem as if dung, having been expelled by man, had set itself up as a new and hostile and magically powerful element that could cover the whole earth".
** On another occasion, in The Auk, the American Ornithologists Unionn quarterly, he observed, of a subspecies of Malaysian cuckoo: **{:.break one} ** Riley (Proc. Biol. Soc. Wash., 51: 96, 1938) named a race, minor, from Borneo, on the basis of "averaging a lighter gray on the head, throat, and chest; the size smaller in comparison with sumatranus".
For viewers weaned on the postmodern hodgepodge of "Blade Runner," the antiseptic, shopping mall ambience of the perfected Everytown itself seems quaint, and the implied social policies of this technocracy are somewhat disturbing: As Richard Pryor observed of a similar future depicted in the 1976 "Logan's Run," this ideal world appears to have no place for minorities.
Danny, in the hospice, observes of a dead patient, "inside was all the clockless silence of death".
Virtuosity has a purpose, and there is, as the historian Arnold Haskell observed of Ms. Alonso, a sense of power in reserve.
Georgina Mikhael has observed of Falciani, "He has an enormous imagination.
In April , 1960 a reporter observed of Morgan, "Behind the bravado one senses confusion, regret, anxiety over what lies ahead".
The result is a subtle, witty and acutely observed study of a narrow but very recognisable world.
