He excelled at pithy, perceptive description.
Robert Ackerberg Massapequa, N.Y., April 29 , 2009 To the Editor: Senator Olympia Snowe is on the mark with her perceptive description of the demise of today's Republicans and her plea for greater ideological diversity to attract a broader voter base in the future.
In their report, the child's physicians acknowledged their indebtedness "to the late Agatha Christie for excellent and perceptive clinical descriptions, and to Nurse Maitland for keeping us up to date with the literature".
While Shone is an able writer, deft in visual descriptions and perceptive in his portrait of trans-Atlantic differences, "In the Rooms" drifts too far from these strengths.
The perceptive parameters of voice quality are genuinely linked to spectral descriptions, such as spectral richness or harmonic amplitudes.
We could, for instance, talk about the meaning behind the descriptions of Alexandria as an "unreal" city, already (as perceptive Reading Group contributors have pointed out) feeling like TS Eliot's Waste Land.
In one of several perceptive and often hilarious literary essays, there's a fine description of Philip Larkin as "a well-scripted character whose tone was pitched midway between the reactionary acerbities of WC Fields and the self-deprecating complaints of Eeyore the donkey.
Naomi's description of her early adolescence is enticing and shyly perceptive.
Occasionally he also gives in to the temptation to write ludicrous descriptions of Naipaul's posher friends - he calls Anthony Powell "a perceptive, gossipy man with a large head" - or cross-cuts heavy-handedly from an adulterous jaunt to Pat's domestic misery.
Healthy traits, for example, included descriptions such as "is genuinely dependable and responsible" and "is socially perceptive of a wide range of interpersonal cues".
