He was looking for superb exchanges of dialogue and fantastic moments, vertiginous possibilities for the English language, whereas Tolstoy lived for the sobriety of moral judgment.
It was a vertiginous fall for George Romney, who, while running for president in 1967, asserted that generals and diplomats had given him "the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get" when he toured Vietnam two years earlier.
It's worth the vertiginous climb for the views across the forest to the neighbouring lakes.
This holiday season, designers are trading vertiginous heels for vamp-heavy embossed leather and flouncy Lurex flats.
Often all the lines and formulations cluster into a single sentence, which can be a vertiginous experience for this politics watcher at least.
The director, Peyton Reed, infuses every scene with sparkling verbal and visual invention, and the dénouement is a vertiginous duet for director and actress, a three-minute tour de force of astounding simplicity.
That's a vertiginous fall for a party that delivered a political volcano just three years ago (recall our cover, to the right), ejecting the Liberal Democratic Party from power for the first time (with one brief exception) since the time of the Eisenhower administration in America.
Setting the standard in the overture, some of his speeds verged on the vertiginous, especially for the Auto-da-fé number, where the concert staging devised by Thomas Kiemie required the chorus to sway around as well as sing, and for Candide's final aria, Nothing More Than This, which was robbed of some of its poignancy by his briskness.
Those with a robust tolerance for dislocation, for the vertiginous sensation of reality disintegrating underfoot and for the occasional streak of slapdash prose can find it in the work of Philip K. Dick.
Finally, the vertiginous photographs speak for themselves.
