With his blue-collar accent and feisty physicality at odds with the shuffling movements of old age, Mr. Strauss vividly nails a familiar character type.
It brings a familiar world vividly to mind.
The dips on the cold meze – hummus, tabbouleh, a smear of vividly pink tarama, the familiar yogurt, cucumber and garlic dip – are merely fine.
(Sound familiar?) I vividly remember how during the conversation I raised some objections about another publication of his, "Moses of Oxford," which he admitted to me "may have some points that are halachically problematic, but this book is different".
Pullman's words cast me back to the worries of starting secondary school, and I vividly remember returning, once home, to the familiar worlds of Green Knowe and Kirrin Island, Redwall – oh, the late, lamented Brian Jacques – and The Borrowers.
Thirteen years later, that familiar spinning wheel appeared again, more vividly this time, in Kubrick's landmark film.
I remember the day it clicked into place in my head, vividly and with a sensation like vertigo: a familiar landscape suddenly seen upside down, inside out.
What stood out even more vividly was something too obvious, and perhaps even too familiar, for television to showcase: an African-American president holding court as two white, and white-haired, former presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, looked on deferentially.
Vividly coloured, with wide-eyed, floating figures, they tell familiar Biblical stories - the Flood, the Dream of Jacob, the Ascension of Elijah - but with a freshness that inevitably shocked the more conservative churchgoers.
The hiker's familiar stretches of glumness are recorded just as vividly as the inevitable moments of exhilaration, as when he walks into the wind's "boulders and logs of hard air" up on Haughton Common in Northumberland.
