But despite a fondness for soul-searching lyricism, whenever he looks up from his navel, Alex views the dark side of the modern West with cool, merciless clarity.

Paul was just drunk enough to retain a merciless clarity.

Could it be the new Disney Hall with its merciless clarity?

The floodlight mounted above the kitchen door lit the clotheslines and the garden with merciless clarity, revealing everything that needed to be revealed.

Against a dim nightmare background of dusky interweaving shapes and shadows, that white form was limned in merciless and awful clarity.

In the cracked, blurred mirror she had barely seen her own face, but now with a merciless clarity it gave back the naked body, the unbelievable and insane alterations there.

Stylistically, it relates to Raphael's Portrait of Agnolo Doni, ca.1506, in what Claudio Strinati described in 1998 as its "merciless clarity."

The merciless clarity in his eyes chilled her: it seemed to settle like frost on her bones.

The candlelight lit their faces eerily from below, also lighting the cup with merciless clarity, and he knew he was trembling again.

John Branner lay there, face down, his cleft head revealed in merciless clarity in the steady light.