Word: bleak
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...until a Leningrad writer told me: That's where you are wrong. [The older neo-Stalinists] are dreadfully mistaken, but you can struggle against them because they believe in something. The younger ones coming up believe in nothing-except their own power and privilege.' It is a bleak thought, the older bureaucrats poisoned with Stalinism, the younger with cynicism...
...months later, I was back in Cambridge, and another reading period mania was settling in. It was just too bleak out to go anywhere, and it was one of those terrible periods when you already knew the last Beatles album by heart, and you knew there wouldn't be another one for months, and you had been to Tommy's so often that it only made things worse...
Francis, as well as I, knew almost nothing about how inorganic ions were arranged in three dimensions. We had to face the bleak situation that the world authority on the structural chemistry of ions was Linus Pauling himself. Thus if the crux of the problem was to deduce an unusually clever arrangement of inorganic ions and phosphate groups, we were clearly at a disadvantage. By midday it became imperative to locate a copy of Pauling's classic book, The Nature of The Chemical Bond...
...guerrillas' disadvantage, the bleak, rocky West Bank, where they target most of their operations, does not provide good cover, and the Israelis are a formidably efficient enemy. They claim to have killed or captured 2,650 fedayeen and tend to dismiss them as amateurs. "We cannot dignify them with the name guerrilla or commando," says an Israeli officer. "The Arabs who cross over show no daring. In that respect, they are nowhere near Viet Cong standards." The Israelis do respect Arafat, however. Their intelligence network has twice reported him on Israeli soil, and twice he escaped a dragnet. "Anyone...
...cheerless load of snow and misery onto the frozen ground, when fingers numbed by cold try to hammer out the five tutorial papers due by dawn, when the sparkly conversation of a Lesley College charmer is not quite enough to make a satisfactory night's entertainment. On those bleak days, an ideal Lampoon would appear at the corner newsstands. And like a speech by Al Vellucci or a chance meeting with a Yalie, it would make Harvard students forget all their minor problems and look at life with wry benevolence again...