in the act

• “I was in the act of bowing to thank them for their acceptance when the door of the mess-room was flung open and the colonel hurried into the room, with an agitated face.”

  The Adventures of Gerard

• “When the enemy endeavored to erect a battery themselves, Captain William Washington, cousin to the general and a superb cavalry officer, together with Lieutenant James Monroe, raced forward with the advance guard and, “taking two pieces in the act of firing, drove the artillerists from their guns.””

  Simon & Schuster: Angel in the Whirlwind

• “With its fangs at the rear of the mouth, it lacks the ability to deliver a lightning-quick poisonous stab, like a rattlesnake; instead it enwraps its prey and injects its venom methodically in the act of chewing.”

  Simon & Schuster: The Song of The Dodo

• “Wright had been caught in the act of raping Elizabeth Gregory, a ten-year-old Queensborough girl.”

  Simon & Schuster: Morgan’s Run

• “Jerry halted in the act of lowering himself into a chair, and stared at a smiling Frank Randall.”

  Simon & Schuster: Songs of Love & Death

• “In truth I had not yet sufficiently automatized the various motor subskills for driving to roll down a window while engaged in the act of driving.”

  Simon & Schuster: A Mind at a Time

• “If she had appeared to be catching a train, he might have inferred that he had come on her in the act of transition between one and another of the country-houses which disputed her presence after the close of the Newport season; but her desultory air perplexed him.”

  Simon & Schuster: The House of Mirth

• “Alexander, caught in the act and unwilling to challenge his father so soon after his return from exile, admitted he had behaved imprudently.”

  Simon & Schuster: Alexander the Great

• “According to the legend — of which, however, St. Avitus, a witness of the baptism of Clovis, was ignorant in the fifth century, and the first trace of which appears in Hincmar — the holy ampulla was brought by a dove to St. Remigius when he was in the act of crowning Clovis.”

  The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 12: Philip II-Reuss

• “The distinction between necessary and possible being, and between existence and essence or quiddity, the identity of the act of intellection with existence in the generation of the heavenly intelligences, and the emphasis upon the role of the tenth intellect as the illuminator of the human intellect in the act of knowl - edge, are outstanding features of this most perfect formulation of Muslim Peripatetic philosophy elabo - rated by Avicenna.”

  Dictionary of the History of Ideas

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