The horrors Hanns witnessed at Bergen-Belsen had turned him "fierce to the point of brutality with those he interrogated, and full of hate," writes Mr Harding.
The Ummayads exercised both grim brutality and demanded fierce unity; they created a culture of extraordinary devotional architecture and relentless expansionism.
The brutality of the attack prompted fierce criticism of the police, rows in parliament and protests in which tens of thousands of people took to the streets.
With its fierce, fine Bronze Age war beats, its lines exhaling brutality and delicacy in turn, the "Iliad" was to the Greeks the breath of life for all of word and rhythm that followed.
He exaggerated the expression of his figures, from the fierce fanaticism or feverish ecstasy of saints and the brutality of executioners to the voluptuous smiles of satyrs and the drunken stupor of Silenus, companion to Dionysus, the god of wine.
Similarly, the "mark of Cain" that God places on Cain after he murders Abel, promising sevenfold vengeance for anyone who harms him, was probably a tale designed to highlight the brutality of the Kenites, Israel's notoriously fierce neighbors.
They were not convinced by the Kremlin's belated official explanation for the killing of Politkovskaya, 48, a fierce critic of Mr Putin, who won international acclaim for exposing the brutality of Russian forces in Chechnya.
In one clip, featured in a video report from London's Telegraph, a man surrounded by the bodies of children asked, "What was their crime, Bashar?" The extreme brutality of the killings, and the images of massacred children, inspired fierce protests in Syria and condemnation from around the world.
THE fierce competition for attention at Beijing's motor show says something about the increasing brutality of China's auto market, now the second-biggest in the world.
Kia Corthron, the creator of this intense, exasperating study of police brutality in black neighborhoods, is a singular voice among American playwrights: a fierce mixture of painstaking researcher and lyrical dramatist.
And Lai Yuk-ching's Lavinia caught the fierce inner strength of a young woman who refuses in the end to submit to the brutality of her attackers.
