Critics call its screenplay soap-operatic: The Lear figure (Jason Robards) molests his daughters (Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Jennifer Jason Leigh), who babble in lengthy pop-psych disquisitions.

The opera is otherwise filled with lengthy disquisitions by the archbishop, his priests and the women of Canterbury, about martyrdom, the church and other topics.

Warming to his subject, Otwal favored Patch with a lengthy disquisition on his subject of terror.

Despite the work's lengthy disquisitions on weapons and war, its pretenses of political pragmatism and open-eyed realism, it is Botvinnik's humorous asides that produce the play's most memorable passages.

Mr. Miller, a long-suffering Nets fan who has held season tickets since the team moved into this arena in 1980, launched into a lengthy disquisition on the beleaguered franchise and its troubles.

His prologue, for example, is a lengthy disquisition on that now-legendary 1989 confrontation in Tiananmen Square between an unarmed student and a Chinese Army tank.

Especially disconcerting was said to be his lengthy disquisition on numerology.

Others are lengthy disquisitions on Shakespeare and mythology.

As for identities, I suppose I could continue on the subject with a lengthy disquisition on the construction of national identities in early modern Europe, drawn from my new book.