Snow, in this poem, is merciless and deadly: the lonely Lucy Gray, who wanders out into an unexpected blizzard, gets lost and is never seen again.
Behind closed doors, she admits that she is tired of being branded a money-hoarding sadist, steel-hearted and merciless.
Always a contrived fiction, this sequence juxtaposes a poignant fantasy of a fully fit presenter with the merciless world of hard news.
He cut his teeth on the "cruel and merciless employer" role in George Huang's 1995 comedy, putting Frank Whaley's Guy through his paces in a new job, and snarling through crushing putdowns that would drive the average person to a quiet cry in the office loos.
The closing chapters of the book, in which Hurstwood is ruined and then disgraced, are among the most powerful pages in a novel of merciless momentum, whose unsentimental depiction of big-city life sets it apart.
In London, the Daily Express wrote of Sister Carrie: "It is a cruel, merciless story, intensely clever in its realism, and one that will remain impressed in the memory of the reader for many a long day".
Although this appeal to the parochial record of individual Dail deputies might save a few Fianna Fáil TDs, there is still likely to be a merciless cull of its parliamentarians.
That became impossible by the time I got to the penultimate chapter and found Saint-Exupéry and his companion Prevot downed in the desert, battling against thirst and time under the merciless sun of the Sahara.
Self-flagellation was seen at its most merciless in last weekend's For The Record column in the Observer, where readers' editor Stephen Pritchard was characteristically stern in taking a classical CD reviewer to task for praising an oboist for his "almost 40 minutes of continuous solo" in Vaughan Williams's oboe concerto – in reality "the piece lasts barely 20 minutes", he pointed out scornfully.
First Pyongyang threatened the US government with a "merciless response" if it failed to stop the film's release, saying it would be considered an "act of war".
But at the time of his stay at Bucca, Baghdadi's group was little-known, and he was a far less significant figure than the insurgency's notional leader, the merciless Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who came to represent the sum of all fears for many in Iraq, Europe and the US.
