As the former, animated by a jealous fury which blazes through the formality of the social dances and ignites like a match in a firework box at the first street encounter, Julie Worden is darkly splendid.
The skeptical British philosopher A. J. Ayer has written about an encounter that was less splendid; it "slightly weakened his conviction" that his death would be the end of him, "though I continue to hope that it will be".
The splendid journalist Dennis Barker was the only person I encountered at the Guardian more clueless than I when it came to computers.
A witty, sparkling memoir despite its principal matter: two decades of encounters with psychotherapists who were, with one splendid exception, remote, inappropriately involved or just peculiar.
Come now, you've seen the look that beams so unnervingly from the faces of Antony Sher and Harriet Walter, the show's splendid stars, and if you're a New Yorker, you encounter it daily.
Some were symbolic, as in Janis Rapoport's After Paradise, in which the intrepid explorer encountered the physical and spiritual in all their splendid confusion, and others actual, as in Stephen Scobie's Taking the Gate: A Journey Through Scotland.
They beheld the splendid weirdness of the century plant and the joshua tree and encountered saguaro cactus for the first time, the giant of the Sonoran desert, with its mighty fluted trunks and sagging humanlike arms".
It was a fortuitous encounter with a former Next Wave editor in the year 2000, a splendid person by the name of Kirstie Urquhart, that was the genesis of the Phil Dee column.
I thought Ray Hobbs and Nicole Hammersla did a splendid job of capturing the nervous energy required for this bizarre and hilariously dysfunctional encounter (cruising a bus station hasn't been this much fun in years).
Trophy professors are wooed with outsized paychecks, splendid housing, travel allowances, well-endowed research centers, brilliant colleagues -- and the promise that they'll rarely encounter an undergraduate.
