In any case, in "Game of Thrones" people always take second place to machinery — the big ticking clockwork of plot and relationships, of family trees and maps and flowcharts symbolized by every episode's best feature, the beautifully animated opening-credit sequence that gives an aerial survey of the show's world.
All of these birds – none weighing more than an ounce, and the smallest of them, the goldcrest, barely tipping the scales against a 10p piece – have a crisp, spruce look; their colours might be new-applied by a fine paintbrush, their songs are jaunty tintinnabulations, even their movements from twig to twig have a ticking clockwork quality.
He replied, with that opaque courtesy beloved of both Chinese officials and Whitehall mandarins, that it could not be done.He was a figure who might have been at home in the Middle Kingdom, where professional scholar-officials, with the equivalent of his double starred firsts in English and law from Cambridge, kept the vast realm ticking like clockwork.
The intertwining of the voices of Agnès and the Boy, soprano and counter tenor, often with just the sparest accompaniment, is spell-binding; the ability to crystallise a whole mood in a single mysterious orchestral chord or a bare, ticking percussion clockwork is magical.
But the production ticked away with clockwork precision.
Even though independent artisans like Mr. Xu are hard to find, watchmaking in China has a long tradition, while today's blossoming demand for luxury watches, mostly made in Europe, recalls imperial times when Swiss-made clocks and clockwork curios ticked in many dignitaries' homes.
I live in Kabul, where most of my friends tick with the same emotional clockwork.
They move quicker than clockwork, only their tick-tock limbs loop the stage anti-clockwise.
The stale, tired, corrupt period of the nineteen-thirties in France represented a kind of clockwork condition, a zestless ticking of the human machine.
The mysteries at the heart of Twin Peaks's first two seasons the murder of Laura Palmer and the mystical methods Special Agent Dale Cooper uses to find her killer provide the clockwork that keeps the show ticking along.
The clock on the mantelpiece loudly marks real time; the clockwork precision of the plot ticks perfectly along and a horrible hollowness seems to fill the stage, as if we are looking at the mask of a play rather than the play itself.
