The principal figures are set down in large explanatory details that struggle unsuccessfully to take shape as portraits.
The story's two principal figures are Bokonon, the religion's founder, and Dr. Felix Hoenikker, inventor of ice-nine.
The principal figures are Marina, an Upper West Side party girl frittering a huge advance on a sociological study of children's clothing; Danielle, a documentary researcher whose ideas rarely make it into production; and Julius, a gay, half-Vietnamese freelance reviewer who has the self-awareness to realise that "from charming wastrel to needy, boring failure was but a few short steps".
The principal figures are Thomas Brown, Sir William Hamilton, James Frederick Ferrier and Alexander Bain, and later in the century, the so-called "Scottish Idealists" notably James Hutchison Stirling, Edward Caird, and D.G. Ritchie.
The other principal figure is Mr. Taylor.
The principal figure is not, we gradually learn, a simple pickup artist.
The film's principal figure is not Gatsby but Nick Carraway, a classic unreliable narrator, aged 30 in that summer of 1922, a midwesterner educated at Yale alongside Tom Buchanan and Daisy's second cousin.
A conservative-nationalist group of writers was highly influential before 1918; its principal figure was Ferenc Herczeg, an author of novels and plays.
The patriarchal history begins with the divine promise to Abraham that "I will make of you a great nation" (12 2) and tells the stories of Abraham (chapters 12 25) and his descendants: Isaac and his twin sons Jacob and Esau (chapters 26 36) and Jacob's family, the principal figure being (chapters 37 50), whose story tells how the Israelites came to be in Egypt.
