A professional travel writer and amateur eccentric, Ms. Jones writes with pungent observation and wit.
He liked to quote Mencken's pungent observation that being a newspaper reporter was a chance to "lay in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer and a midwife".
"Trials of the Diaspora" takes its title from its final epigraph, Philip Roth's pungent observation in his still undervalued novel "Operation Shylock": "In the modern world, the Jew has perpetually been on trial; still today the Jew is on trial, in the person of the Israeli — and this modern trial of the Jew, this trial which never ends, begins with the trial of Shylock".
Bishop's letters, which are full of pungent observations about Brazilian political and cultural figures, have sold even better than her poems and had a big impact in intellectual circles.
Perhaps the most pungent observations were made in Spain, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Hungary, for teams representing those countries felt most, directly or indirectly, the effects of Italy's mixture of unwarrantable "fury" with her undoubted football talent when she won the so-called World Cup contest last summer.
Her pungent observations deserve the attention of anyone interested in the meaning and significance of the 'Open Science' movement". "Has there been a shift in what "data" means that is key to understanding the future of science?
A vivid conversationalist, Mr. Louis could combine lofty aesthetic thoughts with pungent comic observations about the foibles of dancers.
There are wonderful observations, pungent and funny.
It was reactions, the pungent and sometimes foolish observations of a man who had no hesitation in saying that the book of Genesis revealed the kind of mind "one encounters today among New York wash-room attendants, Mississippi newspaper editors, and Tennessee judges".
But perhaps also more watchful; the one more likely to be making pungent little notes in the day's journal, or transforming his close observations into works of art such as the Talking Heads monologues of the 1980s and 90s, or The Madness Of George III.
"He possessed a singular combination of fiery imagination, capacity for meticulous observation, moral passion and intellectual gaiety," wrote Isaiah Berlin, "with a talent for writing in a manner at once pungent and distinguished, ironical and incandescent, brilliantly entertaining and at times rising to great nobility of feeling and expression".
