CLOSE your eyes and think of Christianity in Britain: especially if you don't have much contact with the real thing, images of village fetes, ancient stone chapels and settled communities in genteel but unnoticeably slow decline may still come to mind.
This kind of prose goes down as easily and unnoticeably as a glass of sparkling water, with no aftertaste.
Patty's tears came on like a rain that starts unnoticeably but surprisingly soon soaks everything.
The doorway was sandwiched almost unnoticeably between a narrow-faced store and the relic of an old time saloon.
In the writer's own lifetime, the contest was unequal, but, as he knew, the balance of power in any relationship can shift — often subtly, almost unnoticeably — in the course of time, and the movies' sway over the imagination of the public has increased exponentially in the century or so since their obscure birth.
Almost unnoticeably the paths suggest contoured smaller gardens, defined not by hedgerows or borders, but by the character of the landscape: slopes of dappled shade, a rocky knoll, a moist, stream-fed woodland, each with its own plantings best suited to the setting.
In both stories Mr. Bennett's prose occasionally and almost unnoticeably switches from the past to the present tense, as if to signal his glee at the immediacy of it all.
If your goal is to have a phone that slips unnoticeably into a pocket, however, this is not your best option.
"The lack of narrative position alone," the filmmaker Wim Wenders wrote, escorts the audience "into a black hole in which they are led, almost unnoticeably, toward looking at this time through the eyes of the perpetrators, and generates a kind of benevolent understanding of them".
A portrait of a marriage sliding ineluctably into crisis, Ms. Herzog's delicately constructed drama simmers along coolly until, almost unnoticeably, the small secrets and larger lies that have become woven into the fabric of a young couple's life begin to tear them apart.
As his story lurches towards the inevitable horrors of its conclusion, the schoolboy chuckles turn slowly, almost unnoticeably, into chilling snorts of genuine insanity.
