When John Tauranac heard that the W and Z subway lines were about to fade into a penury-induced sunset, his heart sank.
Lower tax rates, free trade and more stable currencies moved something like 2 billion people out of dollar-a-day penury into prosperity.
He describes Raymond Carver as managing to carve from a "near wreck of a life" — penury, heavy drinking, illness — "stories of exquisite directness, polish and calm that sit in the mind like perfect porcelain teacups," though they often depict lives "beneath the threshold of any aspiration higher than day-to-day survival".
As a result, he sank into a querulous penury, which his wife's withdrawn and sombre religiosity did nothing to mitigate.
His great grandfather was the glorious King Jaja, who escaped a life of penury as a slave in rural 19th-century Nigeria to become a great leader, only for the British to capture and imprison him.
Most important, beneath his uninviting veneer, something about Mr Brown himself is different.He may not be charming, but at least he seems to mean it when he talks about the state's role as a bulwark against penury during a recession, and when he denounces "laissez-faire dogma".
But that same year, during a period of particular penury, a chance encounter at his local library with several books on shrooms changed the course of his life forever.
She was only a couple of years shy of 60 when she began to write, after a near-lifetime that began in a degree of privilege and descended into a maelstrom of penury, marriage to a shiftless alcoholic, the struggle to support her family and a series of erratic house moves.
That we refuse to do so, and continue to insist that our refusal can be justified by explanations such as insufficiency of funds and periodic "fiscal crises" and the like, depends upon a claim to penury to which a nation with our economic superfluity is not entitled.
Israel imposed a strict blockade on the narrow Gaza Strip, reducing the population of a million and a half people to a state of penury.
And that brought me here to what seems like a dream, being a published writer of sorts, after a decade of penury that stripped me of my confidence and, I believed, my talent and intellect.
