Word: brutishness
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Topical time haunts the novel; it is the center of these impersonal forces, their measure. Characters swing with "the pendulum of an era," obeying some physics of oscillatory motion. But below the philosophic dimension we recognize a close attention to contemporary detail of world and cultural history. We see "brutish, bottomless" Australia during the war and after, when Caro and Grace Bell are there, existing in the unimpassioned hopelessness and nowhereness of a place where "history's shrivelled chronicle" has already "terminated in unsuccess." When their mother drowns in a bizarre boating accident, we read, "Greece fell, Crete fell, there...
...welt under his; Bob Nystrom still wondered where his contact lens went and vowed to avenge Brad McCrimmon for a scratched cornea. No, the face-smacking, bone-crunching, degrading, "If you can't beat 'em in the alley beat 'em three out of four at Boston Garden," generally nasty, brutish and protracted quarterfinal Thermopylae betwixt the New York Islanders and the Boston Bruins was not a good series for eyes...
Compelled to make love to the Queen, he makes sure his first performance is nasty, brutish and short...
...Industrial Revolution. The subtitles that break up the copy every page or so yield the basic scheme, not to mention mentality, of Toffler's discussion. "The Technicians of Power." "Mechano-Mania." "The Streamlined Family." "The Paper Blizzard." "The Progress Principle." Under industrialism, he argues, life is as nasty, brutish and short as it ever...
...matters and manners were a bit different. Thomas Aquinas admitted the value of prostitutes: without them, he said, homosexuality would engulf society. By the 19th century, wives came to be viewed as creatures far too delicate for the hurly-burly of the bedroom, and their husbands often spent their "brutish passions" elsewhere. In 1866 one bishop complained that there were as many whores as Methodists in New York City...