Veblen claimed he wrote the book as a perceptive personal essay criticizing contemporary culture, rather than as an economics textbook.

Together with Das's evocative and perceptive essays about his many journeys in Sikkim, these make the book more than just a guide: it offers a complete travel experience.

Thanks to Daphne Merkin for her perceptive essay on loss (Hers: "Count Your Losses," May 5).

Mary Kenny in the Catholic Herald considered it "a series of knowledgeable and perceptive linked essays in the tradition of George Orwell".

Professor Early believes that by cleaning up the dialect, the Houston presenters blunted the opera's impact, he writes in a perceptive essay for the St. Louis production's program book.

One of Pater's subjects for a perceptive essay was Leonardo da Vinci; it gave special prominence to the painting now generally known as the Mona Lisa.

He has also written a perceptive essay for the catalogue and compiled a useful chronology of his subject's life and career.

Which does not mean that in his perceptive essay on recommended recordings he always prefers the safe over the ecstatic.

"If he were told to go forth and write about doorknobs, he would return with a witty, perceptive essay in hand," William Grimes said here last year.