And his almost talismanic and, again, repeated use of brand names sometimes seems too much the easy way of portraying a particular social milieu.

Like most fiction set in New York, "Private Acts" concerns itself with a particular milieu; here it is "the upper echelons" of Wall Street investment banks.

Out of that came his initial attempt to relate the Freudian stage theory of infantile sexuality to emergent social capacities and needs in a particular milieu.

Ms. Slepian has one foot in the very particular and interesting milieu of the late 1920's and another in the present.

Its prime concern is in capturing the mood, texture and posturings within a particular milieu and gently letting some air out of its overly inflated romantic balloons.

"I have a pretty good team in this particular milieu," Brady said.

This intense focusing on, or inhabitation of, a particular milieu means that there is little obvious thematic continuity from one book to the next.

"These houses grew out of a particular social milieu - a new class of urban professionals who had enough money to build second homes."

This separation results in a decline of political parties, since they are connected to ideologies and particular social milieus.

Benderson argues that this kind of mingling of classes has been the source of many modern avant-garde movements, and he laments the disappearance of that particular milieu.