Zhu Rongji's admission, though startling, was oblique.
And the research, though startling, was not nearly as impactful for me as the simple visual of Charles Moore's glass jar full of plastic confetti from 1000 miles off our California coast in the middle of the Pacific.
The thrumming bass reverberations that abstractly mark the beginning of the song are refreshingly ambiguous in aural quality: though startling, they actually magnify the presence of the song's quavering vocals.
There is, though, a startling disparity in the esteem with which Gorby is held in the West and his reputation at home.
This ending is not nearly so startling, though, as the lurid, pungent images that Jerry hurls at Peter throughout the play: JERRY: [My] landlady is a fat, ugly, mean, stupid, unwashed, misanthropic, cheap, drunken bag of garbage.
Two world-straddling egotists discussing the life of a third: what a spectacle it must have made, though not as startling as the lunch at Chartwell, Churchill's country house, two years later, when the host inquired of Chaplin what part he would play next.
This argument is fine, though hardly startling, and one does have to negotiate an awful lot of invented obstacles to get there.
Once Sergeant Field persuades parents to put children in those car seats, though, he hears equally startling numbers.
The most startling claim, though, was the last one.
Before that, though, Ahlam relates her startling sexual awakening, a pair of encounters laced with tenderness and violence, eventually contributing to her relative abstinence for years to come. .
In addition to the steady stream of food, there were other cues that this was a set buoyed by the typical though still-startling largess of a Hollywood budget.
