aloof

Although perched aloofly on a remote mountaintop and built without fortifications, Monte Alban, never invaded or sacked, did not exist in isolation but enjoyed brisk trade and cultural exchange with other great civilizations.

Towering somewhat aloofly over seven storeys above its squat neighbour, Campo Baeza's building mediates between the existing low-rise block and surrounding apartments.

One very red sorrel mare, however, was aloofly munching on the hay and seemed oblivious to the crowd or the nervous excitement of the rest of the mares.

But even Virginia Woolf at her most aloofly condescending did not manifest so blithe an incomprehension of the circumstances faced by the overwhelming majority of women, for whom during much of Lawrence's life-time a "privileged" role would have been more likely to mean a meal of one's own than a room of one's own.

In any case, using impersonal style is not merely a matter of behaving aloofly within a narrow discourse community, but much more a signal of a distant relationship wi th the client.

I was, very calmly and aloofly, manipulating, in some way I did not understand, some outside power, one that enabled me to find what I needed.

"He only wants to play or talk and doesn't understand why Daddy is behaving so aloofly...or not behaving at all.

Indeed, of what use are abstractly-worded systematic studies that gather dust aloofly on the shelf?

(31) The Stranger aloofly asks a question about the existence of gymnastics while sitting in a palaestra.

It continued to look quintessentially, aloofly sharklike, all precision and purpose and grace.

The eponymous son is cast aloofly, almost mystically, with the blond-haired boy-saints that Paul Fussell has demonstrated were identified with the sacrificial soldier of the Great War.(33) He mentally wanders off into some mystical "far country, a country guarded by a winged sentry" (312), characterized by a look "inaccessible to reason, beyond reason, belonging to other spaces, other weights and measures, over the edge, somehow of the tangible calculable world" (359).

The perspective is from above, the precise angle from which Eustace Tilley, once a year, gazes aloofly down on a butterfly--and the ladies are indeed like so many ornamental insects, sloughing off their outer garments and standing about in flimsy slips, pulling frocks over their heads or holding them against their bodies to see how they look, sitting down to straighten their stockings or admiring themselves in their new outfits.

Singleton in a Mylar minidress and sporting her lotus tattoo danced aloofly among us, staring off into the distance as Compton swooped in for a close-up.

I left the library reacquainted with Arnold's view that criticism matters since it aims to understand, aloofly, the "best that has been thought and said" I fortified myself with his notion of culture, with "high seriousness," with poetry as "Criticism of life," and with "sweetness and light." I felt, then as now, that Wordsworth and Arnold were giants in a humanist critical tradition which must not perish.

The grounds stretch out almost beyond the ability of the eye to comprehend as terrace leads to gardens to terrace to gardens and so on until one reaches the private lake, where snow-white swans serenely swim, aloofly ignoring the tourists who have rented boats and invaded their territory.