Though we see it through the glow of nostalgia, Star Wars is a pretty brutal setting.
A cross-section of countries - England, the United States of America, Italy, Brazil, Serbia, Burkina Faso and China - provide the often brutal setting for the subject of each short.
The brutal set-to didn't take place in Tahrir Square in Cairo, where as many as 100,000 demonstrators managed to assemble peacefully.
A one-sided focus on Nato's wrongs, to the neglect of a far more brutal set of killers, is a tad hypocritical.
Yet despite the younger contingent fleeing for Kings of Leon on the main stage, Mike Patton's band delivered a brutal set that began with a melodica workout (Midnight Cowboy) before flitting between heavy assaults like Be Aggressive and more experimental leanings.
With the exception of the brutal set piece that opens the story and sends the narrator Carl into his coma, this novel is a considerable departure from Mr. Garland's earlier fiction.
What is striking, however, is the rawness of the accounts, the authenticity of the entries; they cut through the sanitisation of media presentation and popular film depictions, and seem to tell a brutal set of stories.
That first antiwar sermon of his seemed to signal a new high tide of opposition to a brutal set of American policies in Southeast Asia.
Last month Republican Senator Lamar Alexander was quoted as saying "If the history books were written today, we would remember President Obama for the sequester" -- that brutal set of pre-packaged austerity cuts that were jointly agreed upon both parties.
The old man, as Ajami shows, pursued his designs with a brutal logic, setting up a ruling class of Alawites, some Christians and a select number of Sunni businessmen, stifling dissent, stifling the Sunni majority's yearnings for a freer expression of their faith, offering instead the slogans of Pan-Arabism and permanent war with the Jews.
One section of the volume is devoted to a Thomas De Quincey-like panegyric to Gesualdo's brutal handiwork, setting forth a satirical thesis about the connection between music and murder: "The beginning of the decline of murder as an art dates from precisely the same period as the development of music as a personal expression..
