What remains quite singular about Cela, however, is the enormous variety and versatility of the strategies he found for the representation of the human social condition, which explains to a large extent why he has ended up producing more
sustainedly intriguing fiction than anyone else of his generation, as well as how he managed never to become like Pio Baroja, in the sense of a body of writing in which all of the novels end up sounding the same.
For Chaucer the interest of Machaut's poem might well have been more generally its
sustainedly serious attention to the lover's experience of hope, frustration, and loss, transposed into a metaphorical world of avian behaviour.
His book, though flattering an amateur interest in the region (amateur in the best sense of the adjective) is not, from a professional point of view, a serious or even a
sustainedly interesting monograph.
Britten was represented by two of his Canticles, 'Still Falls the Rain'
sustainedly sombre with suppressed anger (hornist Richard Watkins rich in piercing timbres, tenor Mark Padmore expressively equal to the challenge set by his great predecessor Peter Pears, pianist Julius Drake such an empathetic foil), and the warmly serene 'My Beloved is Mine', for tenor and piano alone, bringing such a contrast.
Hall would seem to have scant experience in musicals, not to mention in the kind of
sustainedly ribald eye-rolling that, taken too far, can start to pall.
The origins of the book's individual chapters as separate papers and essays for a variety of occasions and previous publications are sometimes only too evident, but such are the consistency of Rowe's aims and the firmness of his standpoint that At Emerson's Tomb coheres as a work determinedly and
sustainedly provocative of argument and dissent, maybe indeed of continuing and unapologetic 'aesthetic dissent'.
But there will be many, I suspect, who won't mind that the old masters involved in "The Old Masters"--from Gray to director Harold Pinter, the two marking their ninth collaboration, and on to co star Edward Fox--aren't in
sustainedly peak form.
The most
sustainedly funny passages in the play belong to Geoffrey Hutchings' Lucien Cheval, playing a tax inspector with a keen eye for walls from which Modigliani paintings have mysteriously disappeared.
