As he speaks haltingly, in a voice from which he seems to be trying, raspingly, to expel emotion, I find I cannot believe I am here in this converted church.
The outstanding performances come from David Yelland as the King – general-like, raspingly crisp and terminally disappointed – and Desmond Barrit as Falstaff.
Sinclair veterans will know some of the characters in Ghost Milk from earlier books: Renchi Bicknell, the Blake-inspired artist and walker; the visionary Hebridean sculptor Steve Dilworth; and Sinclair's long-suffering and raspingly sceptical wife, Anna.
Even in the hovel, he raspingly refuses to be a separated from his "philosopher", Poor Tom.
Ingo Metzmacher conducts the score with brittle brilliance, every orchestral effect raspingly precise.
His notion was to turn the ground-floor space where Woody Allen has played impassive, Bechet-ish clarinet for many years (and where Bobby Short kept Cole Porter standards raspingly alive for even more) into just another Madison Avenue boutique.
As a child of 5, Marina was drafted into a career in mysticism by her drug-addict mother, after a fateful reading with a seaside fortuneteller named Madame Z, who had tried to read Marina's cards, then trembled, and raspingly prophesied: "She has the gift".
Ali is irreverent, lazy and raspingly sardonic, and his obvious fictional predecessor is Joseph Heller's Yossarian.
John's dire warnings are raspingly seconded by Charlotte's crusty old grandmother and official guardian, Dolly Elaine Stritchh).
On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone.
And her sensibility is sufficiently ghoulish to keep her undaunted by what she calls Highsmith's "hundreds of raspingly acute portraits of quietly transgressive acts," which is a relatively mild way of characterizing the shock value of Highsmith's tirelessly misanthropic work.
