Still, as current evidence makes narcotically clear, politicians can afford to be boring in ways that fictional characters cannot.

We stop at a petrol station, so Andrei can get the first of his many quick fixes of narcotically strong coffee.

What happens first is that the piano gives out a narcotically beautiful tone; solitary lines or open intervals take on a luminous sheen.

The music, too, an Enya-esque, narcotically repetitive blend of the ethereal and the sinister, seemed all-pervasive, so insistent that it clouded the perceptions.

It stood there, absentmindedly chewing, too narcotically blissed by the salty delicacy in its chops to invest much effort in either battle or retreat.

As these children kissed, smiling narcotically, he thought of those magnets he had had at school, which produced a sort of metallic skating between sheets of paper, or made a haystack out of paper clips.

Filtered as they are through escalating doses of morphine and metaphor, the annals of both parts of Ireland become a narcotically seductive fugue state of eros and spirituality, knowledge and forgiveness and death.

Two mixtape DJs from Memphis, DJ Paul and Juicy J, started making their original music, which was distinctive with its "spare, low-BPM rhythms, simplistic chants . . . and narcotically repetitive, slasher-flick textures".

The Hemingway-Fitzgerald generation and its literary successors have tended to treat the world, when they did treat it, as a stage upon which Americans could be more heroically or plangently themselves, or (following the generations down to our day) introspectively, narcotically or psychotically themselves.