Upon meeting, Mr. Balzano found Ms. Johansen singularly charming and "a little bit bizarre," and Ms. Johansen's first thought was "I'm never going to fall in love with this guy".
Putting aside the book's singularly creepy tone, it contains little argumentation that wasn't already commonplace in other, still-circulating anti-Semitic and extreme-right literature.
They are uniformly encyclopedic, opinionated (East Retford is "a singularly unattractive town"; "Cornwall possesses little of the highest aesthetic quality") and written with an evocative vocabulary that can describe buildings or their features as "lanky", "frantic", "victoriously vulgar" or "Grecian gone gaudy".
David Yang, a writer at Sports Illustrated China, complained that most young Chinese are singularly focused on academics and are given little opportunity to take part in sports at school.
The little folk of Flores had singularly short legs and long, flapper feet, very similar to those of African apemen, even though limbs like these would have made their long march from Africa to Flores a painful business.
"The sheer scale and duration of sustained attacks against such a wide set of industries from a singularly identified group based in China leaves little doubt about the organization behind APT1," concludes the report.
"This strikes us as most unfair and singularly inappropriate, particularly when authors are paid so little".
At first glance, visitors arriving by bullet train to Hiroshima's main railway station might have little inkling of the city's singularly tragic past.
Which might be forgivable if she did anything of interest, but aside from a few good bits of back-story about the war there's little more in here than navel gazing and singularly sexless bed-hopping.
It might be argued, too, that a reviewer ought delve deeper than the trade-press publications by which print-media reviews are so singularly (and often exclusively) beguiled; certainly, W.W. Norton's poetry list needs little introduction to the great mass of American poetry-readers.
