"These, then, are oblique, ironic moral fables, and they are written in a spare, elegant and witty prose," Johanna Kaplan said here in 1981.

Brown's sharp, witty prose garnered her publication in The New Statesman while she was still an undergraduate at Oxford.

With its expertly nuanced characters, beautifully developed sexual tension, and witty and graceful prose, The Spy's Kiss is nothing short of brilliant.

For 30 years he issued an annual booklet of witty prose or poetry by favored writers, beautifully printed and humorously illustrated.

Chabon's characters inhabit more genre worlds than one but are surrounded, wherever they are, by a witty, resonant prose in which sharp observation often shades into metaphor.

What's more, he fortified their best ideas with crisp and witty prose.

In addition to his academic folklore works, he also published linguistic and ethnomusicological studies, as well as reviews and even witty cultural prose.

But Mr. Menand fans out broadly across the American intellectual landscape, delivering a history of ideas written, as one critic said, with "rare common sense and graceful witty prose."

After leaving the War Office, Beith published several volumes of war histories, but his habitual light and witty prose was widely thought unsuited to so grave a subject.

Her last point is true only if crisp, concise and witty prose is unentertaining.