Word: dantean
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...budget Canterbury is a kind of unrest home where an inmate ekes out his life like an indeterminate prison sentence. Most of the attendants are too overworked and too unfeeling to do more than slap the patients into line. The wards are the circles of a neo-Dantean inferno. In Stationary, the patients are strapped into chairs to groan, curse and soil themselves through the day. In Hydro, a patient is wrapped mummy-fashion in icy wet sheets for 72 hours at a stretch. In the "untidy" wards the bedridden turn their heads obsessively from side to side, rubbing...
World War II brought him a special kind of recognition he never aspired to, when he went down into London's underground as a war artist to do a series of air-raid "shelter drawings." These, unique in their shrouded, sallow-hued style, conveyed with Dantean impact the spectacle of humanity huddled in refuge, yet fated to stir again, to live and to work on. Londoners, who would have blanched at the sight of his statues, recognized themselves in his swaddled figures, and hailed him as one of their...
Sack then turns his attention to the early season Radcliffe social, the jollyup, which "brings together fifty or so girls and upwards of two hundred stage for an evening of pure Dantean borror...