James Thurber, who wrote intimately about animals, is one of his favorite writers; another is A. A. Milne.
In "Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents," he writes intimately about the relationship between politics and faith in Britain, the Netherlands, France, China, Japan and the United States.
Of course, Roth himself is guilty (if that's the right word) of writing intimately about what it feels like to be black.
Gogol is best known for scathing satirical masterpieces about Russian society such as Dead Souls and The Nose, but he also wrote intimately about his experience of Ukrainian customs in works such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.
My friend the biographer Hazel Rowley, who has died aged 59 after suffering a stroke, wrote intimately about the lives of the novelists Christina Stead and Richard Wright, the French intellectuals Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and the presidential couple Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Perkins said they confirm his genius: "He brings to them his deep knowledge and love of the land he is from, writing intimately and beautifully about childhood and memory, landscape and change, and the great magnetic pull of home".
Like him, she writes intimately about sex, parenthood, creativity, work, belief and politics, and like him she does so not through people with enormous power or importance in the world but through a concept of intelligent private life that acts as a prism for these larger forces.
Our writing is so incredible because we know what we write intimately: not just in terms of content, culture and language, but also in terms of stakes.
Inspired, because Cusk has written so intimately and ferociously about her own feelings on motherhood and divorce.
