essence

But, in essence, there will be a simplicity at play because of a few fundamentals at the heart of the union: they know how to, and want to, love us.

The ex was an intellectual colossus, a paragon of virtue and tenderness, the essence of kinky complicity.

The evening, so innocuous in its outward form, so enlivened by the arrival of a smiling waiter (‘the bouillabaisse perhaps for sir or madam?’), is in essence a referendum on whether or not we must die alone.