But A Country Child, Uttley's overpoweringly rich and detailed reminiscences about her late-Victorian childhood in a farmhouse in Derbyshire fed my very soul as surely as her lived experience did hers.
It is, for a start, drenched in sex – both offstage (in Nijinsky's openly gay love affair with his mentor, the legendary impresario Sergei Diaghilev) and in the overpoweringly ambivalent erotic presence of the man himself.
Robust, full-bodied and very dark, with tarry and brambly flavours, this is an unmistakably New World wine, but not overpoweringly so.
Made in a French press, the dark chocolate smell is overpoweringly wonderful.
The propaganda for guns and the identification of gun violence with masculinity is so overpoweringly strong in our culture that it is indeed hard to ask those who already feel disempowered to resist their allure.
The predictable result was that a meal intended to celebrate a traditional Christmas (in an England I scarcely knew) now infallibly and overpoweringly reminds me of Hong Kong, The taste it leaves is oddly dark, even bitter.
It's a situation in which, as Erland Josephson has written, Bergman is "overpoweringly self-assured in his efforts to overpower insecurity; full of empathy in order to keep his impatience under control; full of impatience in order to keep his empathy under control".
The Quinoa Old-Fashioned (muddled raspberries, Corsair Quinoa Whiskey) did not taste overpoweringly of quinoa; the Smoke and Mirror Martini (Laphroaig rinse, blue-cheese-stuffed olive) was fantastic.
Milne wrote, "If you stop painting policemen in order to paint windmills, criticism remains so overpoweringly policeman-conscious that even a windmill is seen as something with arms out, obviously directing the traffic".
But the harmonies remain, sometimes overpoweringly so, a density that's a residue of the group's gospel heritage; in places it can sound too controlled, too crisp.
I had spent a night in a guest room in their home at Gates Mills, Ohio, outside Cleveland, where Feller had built one of the most overpoweringly successful pitching careers in the history of the game in his Hall of Fame career with the Indians.
