It's very hard to know when food matters to the well-tended, well-traveled and insular group that moves at its higher reaches.

According to the organization's executive director, "they are a small, insular group who have their interests.

"They are a very insular group," said one executive who has worked with Mr. Mottola and insisted on not being named.

Mr. Fogel said some orchestras were run by insular groups that did not inspire donor confidence.

A tiny town and most prosperous, Philadelphia was populated by a close-knit, insular group of Mississippians.

Saint Lucia is one of many small land masses composing the insular group known as the Windward Islands.

Like other small, insular groups that live at the mercy of a more powerful force, the detainees have woven intricate, conspiratorial theories about their fate.

It smacks of an insular group of people that don't understand their target audience.

His perspective has been that of the archetypal Jew, blithely considering, with absurdist exaggeration, the ways in which different insular ethnic groups perceive each other.

Few historians have written more strongly than Wilson does here about the arrogance with which small, insular groups control our lives.