He was bullied at school for one terrifying year, after which he became a bully himself, began to smoke at the age of seven and to con money out of people by crying outside the post office and pretending he had no money for stamps to write home to his parents.
In the terrifying year of 1940, as country after country in Europe fell to Hitler's tanks, planes and bombs, F.D.R. ran for an unprecedented third term and hoped to forge a bipartisan foreign policy team.
So they lived through what must have been the most terrifying year of their lives, while I wandered through one dangerous situation after another.
To those of us who remember all the front page photos of Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley at the premiere, it seems like no time at all, but in fact Four Weddings has been around for a terrifying 20 years: it premiered at the Sundance Festival in January 1994, before being released in the United States that March.
But the ruling by the country's highest court on Monday to overturn the genocide conviction of the former dictator, Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, is a serious setback in the effort to demand accountability for those terrifying years and move the country toward reconciliation.
Negotiating the ensuing web of lawsuits, wounded egos, and tax-avoidance schemes, Walsh, an academic musicologist who writes with the verve of a first-rate critic, never loses sight of the incandescent figure at its center, a man whose supposedly inexpressive music became "the best response to those terrifying years that brought it into being".
On Thursday, we celebrated 40 terrifying years of "The Exorcist".
But as the survivor of a terrifying and pernicious six-year bout of anorexia nervosa when I was a teenager in the 1980s, I am concerned by the description of yet another "variation" of anorexia.
There is no evidence for such dealings, and so, in all likelihood, we will be left with only one true conspiracy: the one that caused it all – the one that sent 270 people to their deaths on a terrifying December night 21 years ago.
Though Evelyn Waugh mellowed in his later years (a development his son curiously attributed to a dental operation in which he had all of his teeth removed without anesthetic), he was for many years a terrifying parent, reserving the right, as Auberon put it, "not just to deny affection to his children but to advertise an acute and unqualified dislike for them".
