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.
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.
It was in the late winter of January 1950 that Tom Stuttard took this carefully observed photograph of a Manchester street scene.
At the law school last fall, she observed tapes of a few first-year students interviewing their first "clients".
