Nor would those candidates now be desperately outdoing one another with brutish demands for ever more tax relief for zillionaires.
The Hollywood entrepreneurs — nasty, brutish, and, for the most part, short — were extraordinary for the robustness of their appetites: they were cruel, they were cunning, they were killers.
With some reason: crops are failing, there's no welfare state yet (though obviously no clunking lines mentioning this) and life is simply nasty, brutish and, for some of the lads, just boys, queuing to sign up for the coming horrors of the Somme, about to get very short.
Is "24" attempting to trade in its brutish reputation for a more bookish mien?
His imprisonment, Black once opined, amounted to a "fleeting moment of brutish triumph" for the US government that he would eventually reverse.
Wasn't he, on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, party to one of the cruellest shows on TV, one that helped set brutish standards for British comedy and culture?
A few pages later, he hammers the point home: "In today's America, neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf.
He has in mind particularly the dread "liberal hawks," whom he has also attacked on the New York Times Op-Ed page for the rhetorical cover they gave the Bush administration and its court ("In today's America neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig leaf").
Weeks turn into months, and MeiMei tells me we need to follow a schedule that requires temperature taking, ovulation calendars and brutish demands for sex.
To many, at home and around the world, Qaddafi is a savant and a buffoon, his long rule and global meddling made possible by oil money and a brutish gang of paid-for-enforcers.
