Ms. Zambello's program note put a perhaps gratuitous feminist spin on the action, but worse from the reactionaries' point of view, the picturesque traditional trappings of Highland Gothic had been jettisoned in favor of a bleak, symbol-heavy heap of rubble.
Dolly was many things: a good man, a beautiful cricketer and a symbol of hope at a bleak time.
Technically, the later novels are more coherent, plots being more fully related to themes, and themes being often expressed through a more insistent use of imagery and symbols (grim symbols, too, such as the fog in Bleak House or the prison in Little Dorrit).
Like Denis Compton and Stanley Matthews, who were a little older, Moss was a giant figure of the 1950s, a symbol of the spirit of those bleak times, when sport did so much to distract people from the dreariness of post-war austerity.
And during a month-long trial that became a symbol of police predation, they formed a bleak parade of 13 witnesses who accused a former Oklahoma City officer of using his badge to coerce sex acts and rape.
THE oil city of Daqing, in the bleak plains of north-eastern China, was once a proud symbol of the country's self-reliant spirit.
It seems a cruelly bleak irony to end on: the possibility of his grandfather's beloved symbol of peace, love and understanding, morphing in one lifetime into the likeliest cause of nuclear war anywhere on earth.
It started with a bleak confession of child abuse from one of the world's most recognised sex symbols and ended with a rallying cry from Dame Vivienne Westwood, calling for a complete change in the financial basis of world economics.
At a "victory party" for Clinton supporters, under the veil of a glass ceiling that was meant to be an epic symbol of a historic night when gender barriers were swept aside, there was a bleak mood.
In the Golden Globe-nominated "Hell or High Water," West Texas, with its bleak, flat landscapes and small towns featuring depressed main streets filled with vacant storefronts, is a potent symbol of economic decline and cultural stagnation.
