A Scottish writer with an unsparing eye and a bold, loose-limbed energy, Galloway has managed not to trip over the diaries but to imagine her way in and around them.

Mr. Beam's folky melodies and modest voice - he can sound almost exactly like the Donovan of the 1960's - conceal an unsparing eye.

That attended to, the three men and an escort of centurions set out to examine the camp with an unsparing eye.

As acutely as it conveys the climate of the village, the camera contemplates wracking terminal illness and the suffering it causes with a calm unsparing eye.

The business-backed group bird-dogs the city's fiscal management with an unsparing eye.

But he never undercut his songs; behind the smile was an unsparing eye.

His account of his family's history and his parents' lives in an increasingly desperate Zimbabwe is written with the unsparing eye of a journalist and the tender, conflicted emotions of a son.

Yet behind the uproar was Mr. Albarn's unsparing eye and terse melodic workmanship as he and Blur reclaimed another batch of possibilities, the more the better.

Last year in these pages, Simon Reynolds admired the book's "pungent regional slang" and its "unsparing eye for the desperate pleasures of working-class life."

Then Alex Cox, with "Sid and Nancy," brought an unsparing eye to the careerism and self-destruction of the punk movement.