Word: grimness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...afternoon papers had carried the announcement that the President would address the nation that night on a matter of the "highest national urgency"-and all America seemed to be watching as Kennedy went on television. It was a grim speech, delivered by a grim President...
...diabolic conversation pit are a younger faculty couple who start as passively trapped bystanders and finish as guilty fellow victims. In the long and lacerating annals of family fights on stage, there has been nothing quite like Virginia Woolf's mortal battle of the sexes for sheer nonstop grim-gay savagery. The human heart is not on view, but the playgoer will know that he has seen human entrails...
...Grim Occasion. It was a grim occasion for Negotiator Donovan. His bursitis was paining him, and he was terribly tired. When he stood up at the end of the press conference, he wobbled so alarmingly that policemen hurried to his aid. He had spent eight nerve-grating days waiting around in Havana. Castro had deigned to see him only twice, behaving with the assurance of a blackmailer in a society with no law against blackmail...
...also a grim occasion for the U.S., which somehow found itself offering ransom to the uncouth Communist dictator of an impoverished island less than 100 miles from Florida. That was a grotesquely awkward posture for a nation that cherishes "Millions for defense, but not a cent for tribute" as one of its proud historical utterances.* The ransom negotiations were all the more embarrassing at a time when the U.S. was pressing other nations to halt shipments to Cuba...
Damaged Soles. "In my childhood." Chekhov used to say. with typically accurate restraint, "there was no childhood." His grim father was the self-taught son of one of the rare serfs in Russia who had been able to buy his family's freedom. He kept an anemic grocery store on the Sea of Azov, enrolled his son in a tailoring school as an economic practicality, once shouted at him. "You can't run about so much because you'll wear out your shoes." When a rat drowned in a vat of mineral oil in his store, Father...