But this is an immensely impressive and valuable achievement, despite the moments of knottiness.

The problems would be knotty, but knottiness encourages original escapology."

It's a testament to the work's enduring originality and knottiness that academics continue to argue over its dominant tone and meaning.

In a letter to a friend Henry James wrote, "poor Mrs. Adams found, the other day, the solution of the knottiness of existence."

Aeschylus, the fifth-century B.C. Attic tragedian, is famous for his knottiness, his clotted images and riddling compound words.

Mr. Weston is one of jazz's finest pianists, someone who captures the tone of Duke Ellington and the knottiness of Thelonious Monk.

The album is alternately dense and light, and its mixture of noise and knottiness can sound like contemporary acts Odd Future, Lil B, and Ex Military.

With a big debt to "The Usual Suspects" and "Reservoir Dogs," like the approach to population control, Mr. Ritchie revels in the sheer knottiness of all this scheming.

Like the Potter and "Lord of the Rings" books, "Summerland" constructs as many sub-realms and space-warping complications as it can, and does its best to turn sheer knottiness into an attractive quality.

However, if I had my way, they'd be judged on 'knottiness of their back-combed hair, quantity of eyeliner used, agonizedness of facial expressions, angle of thrusting crotches and shininess of spandex'.

But when she works in serial forms, Mrs. Mamlok's music is relieved of crabbed knottiness; even at its most dissonant, the textures remain crystal clear, allowing each instrument in an ensemble to have its say.

No critic has ever claimed that Brome was a great dramatic poet or a truly distinctive literary stylist; his verse and prose are generally nothing more than functional, and certainly lack the vivid eloquence of Shakespeare and the intellectual knottiness of his idol Jonson.