Just before or just after the first world war was a popular setting for stories with an overtone of catastrophe, the most distinguished examples being JL Carr's A Month In the Country and Isabel Colegate's The Shooting Party (both 1980).
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux's L'Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the genres most highly esteemed are the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire.
Desdemona and Emilia, for example, are "to outward appearance, characters of common life, not more distinguished than women generally are, by difference of rank and situation".
The almanacs, pamphlets, and books that issued from her press, notably the Deputy Commissary's Guide (1774) by Elie Vallette, were typographically distinguished examples of her craft.
NNScore [8], Rfscore [9], and SFCscore [10] are among the most distinguished examples.
One significant example is the distinguished Lebanese cleric Sheikh Fadlallah, greatly respected by Hizbollah and Shia groups generally, outside Lebanon as well.
The best example is the distinguished Hoover Institute on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, housed in the landmark tower by the great West coast classicist, Arthur Brown, Jr. (1941).....and today conjoined with its Washington, D.C. Johnson Center satellite by Fox Architects (2013).
The exceptional ones, of which "America Aflame" is a distinguished example, remind us that the past is ultimately as inscrutable as the future.
But, although opera libretti quarry novels, plays and short stories as raw material, it's hard to find distinguished examples of composers who have mined non-fiction.
The fun came partly from the contestants, who were chosen whenever possible for their intrinsic incongruity -- the dynamite maker, for example, was a distinguished-looking woman of a certain age.
