watchwork

In a conscious double-meaning, the story is as intricate as watchwork itself.

Archive 2009-03-01 Jack of Kent 2009

In a conscious double-meaning, the story is as intricate as watchwork itself.

Watchmen and Politics: a film and book review Jack of Kent 2009

A truly great novel is a feat of watchwork engineering: Each description, each bit of dialogue, each plot-point is installed precisely where it ought to be.

Hotel Dusk: Novel or Game? 2007

A truly great novel is a feat of watchwork engineering: Each description, each bit of dialogue, each plot-point is installed precisely where it ought to be.

Hotel Dusk: Novel or Game? 2007

But there were other and humbler states in Europe, whose very pettiness had brought more fully within their vision the whole machinery and watchwork of pauperism, as it acted and re-acted on the industrious poverty of the land, and on other interests, by means of the system adopted in relieving it.

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 Various

Whereas any direct factual imitation, resting upon painted figures drest up in regimentals, and worked by watchwork through the whole movements of the battle, would have been no art whatsoever in the sense of

Note Book of an English Opium-Eater Thomas De Quincey 1822

But there were other and humbler states in Europe, whose very pettiness has brought more fully within their vision the whole machinery and watchwork of pauperism, as it acted and reacted on the industrious poverty of the land, and on other interests, by means of the system adopted in relieving it.

Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 1 Thomas De Quincey 1822

It turned out very much like a piece of watchwork.

The Quick and the Ed 2009

We rejoice in its multiform manufactures, which weave the woollen or silken fibre into every form and tissue of fabric; in the delicate, dainty skill which keeps the time of all creation with its watchwork and clockwork; which ornaments beauty with its jewelry, and furnishes science with its finest instruments; we rejoice in the 14,000 miles of railway there constructed, almost all of it within forty years; we rejoice in the riches there accumulated; we rejoice in the expansion of the population from the twenty-three millions of the day of Yorktown to the thirty-eight millions of the present; but we rejoice more than all in the liberal spirit evermore there advancing, which has built the fifteen universities, and gathered the 41,000 students into them; which builds libraries and higher seminaries, and multiplies common schools: which gives liberty if not license to the press.

Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z Various

When we examine the structure of a watch, when we come to know thoroughly the use of every part of it, satisfied as we are with the fitness of the whole, we are far enough from perceiving anything like beauty in the watchwork itself; but let us look on the case, the labour of some curious artist in engraving, with little or no idea of use, we shall have a much livelier idea of beauty than we ever could have had from the watch itself, though the master-piece of Graham.

The Real Effects of Fitness 1909