Word: grimness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...this is bad for the blod pressure . . . Ventre gives no guide in this dilemma." Wrote another: man might still "divide, deceive and sometimes rule. A lawn perishing from drought may be saved by its owner's . . . leaving a valuable book outdoors. By a variation of this principle, the grim persistence of watched pots in not boiling can be harnessed to prevent the ruin of a custard...
...wars. Readers were somewhat taken aback by the ferocity of the ending: the unheroic hero stands in the total blackness of the next war's no-man's-land, waiting to toss his Huxdane-Halley bacterial bomb and infect the enemy with leprosy. Black Mischief was a grim guffaw at the efforts of an Oxford-trained black emperor to apply the notions of liberalism, progress, international uplift and birth control to a country as barbaric as Ethiopia. Scoop, the most rollicking of Waugh's novels, reported the lunacies of Communist and fascist revolts in another African state...
Europeans, to whom politics is grim and often deadly business, were puzzled by the rowdedow. Said one Frenchman: "I understand opera singers come and sing popular songs . . . Surely you cannot consider it sound to nominate a President by singing songs...
...Origins of the American Revolution. He writes in the carefully documented tradition of Henry Adams-i.e., unsparing, exact, relying largely on original sources, skeptical of pretensions to high motives. There is, in fact, an undercurrent of exasperation in Author Miller's account, as if he placed the grim record of incompetence and theft and treason in evidence, and said: "Now cheer." Curiously enough, the heroism of the seven years' struggle is all the more remarkable in an account that gives few people credit for much of anything, let alone heroism...
...grim-faced Sewell Avery served the nine directors with an ultimatum: choose him or Norton. The directors, most of them old cronies of Avery who had seen him pull "Monkey Ward" out of the red and up to the second biggest merchandising business in the country, soon made their choice. The secretary of the company then phoned Norton at a Boston hotel; he "requested"-and got-Norton's resignation from his $100,000-a-year...