Word: detail
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...realists among your readers, could you add that it is also the delineation, documented to the last detail, of the origin, development and suppression of a democratic movement in Ireland which was influenced by American ideas even more than French ones? The adjectives valuable, scholarly and realistic have been used [by other critics] to describe the book, which give a different impression from that conveyed by your reviewer. After all, one doesn't endure, for eight years, in exile, the difficulties which were a constant factor of my work on the book, just to embroider in emerald floss another...
Playwright Franken has a pretty good eye for all the detail of middle-class family life-the rich son, the poor son; the huffiness and stuffiness; the furnishings and food. But anything in The Hallams that isn't made of velvet or mahogany seems made of cardboard. Whenever the play abandons the household for the heart, whenever it exchanges class or clan reactions for personal emotions, it becomes feeble, trite or depressingly empty...
Most of the picture is mere "minor" detail and incident: a summer storm, a Sunday Mass, an inarticulate courtship; baking, plowing, haying, threshing; the steady modulation of the days and nights and weathers and seasons across the land. And such images are the chief vocabulary in which the picture's grave eloquence is expressed...
Sustained narrative requires a wealth of the kind of detail that newspapers and press associations do not ordinarily carry. In 1929, when TIME sent its first correspondent,† David Hulburd, to Chicago, it began to discover that narrative quality could be greatly improved by TIME'S own on-the-spot reporting...
Billings' selection of detail told a lot about Calvin Coolidge, the stock from which he sprang, and a lot about the U.S. and about a period which, even in 1933, was becoming dim. The "point" of the story was news because, although it may be hidden, the New England stamp, the shrewd, homely democracy of the little white towns, is impressed on the American character...