Although the book takes time to explore Hollinghurst's principal obsessions with Eros and aesthetics, its main theme is the climate of giddy success among well-to-do Tories between the electoral victories of 1983 and 1987.
The principal obsessions in her four books of verse — race and history, love and family — are played out in poems that can buzz with an electric and angular ellipticity, as in "Emancipation," printed here in its entirety: Corncob constellation, oyster shell, drawstring pouch, dry bones.
Money, the album's other principal obsession, makes better copy.
Winning back support has got to be the principal obsession.
Her subtitle suggests how tempting it is even for a serious historian to lark on her subject's principal obsession.
This reflects the other principal obsession throughout Dick's work: his fear that a powerful person or group can change the perceptions and beliefs of others.
In the past, Mr. bin Laden, one of more than 50 children of a Yemeni-born migrant who made a vast fortune building roads and palaces in Saudi Arabia, has made his principal obsession driving American troops from the Arabian peninsula, site of Mecca and Medina, Islam's holiest sites.
After that, music became his principal obsession, with Vile working dead-end jobs just to fund the production of his next CD, his solo projects, collaborations with his War On Drugs bandmate Adam Granduciel, and home-recorded collections with hand-made psychedelic sleeves that he would hand out to friends and other bands.
Critics see the spending as a reckless exercise in populist decadence intended to burnish Mr. Chávez's image as the region's leading statesmen while embarrassing the Bush administration, the Venezuelan leader's principal obsession since American officials gave tacit support to a failed coup against him in 2002.
Now, with the Yankees having earned three consecutive World Series rings and four in the last five years, the cry is heard again in the land, but with a difference -- in the principal owner's obsession with change, the Yankees themselves might break up the Yankees.
Because of this obsession, Pakistan's "principal air defenses are all pointing east," Shuja Nawaz, an expert on the Pakistani Army and the author of "Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within," told me.
