A professional puppeteer, she seems most at peace only when she's giving grave, gravelly voice to one of her creations.
For to presume a strategy when Trump toys with potentially lethal nations — threatening to tear apart the nuclear agreement with Iran or putting North Korea on notice that doom may befall it any moment — is to imagine that a toddler has given grave consideration to the gravitational aspects of toppling his brother's Lego edifice.
When The Fellowship of the Ring came out last year I gave grave and unrecallable offence to the Tolkie fanbase with disobliging remarks about how the whole middlebrow mythology was dull and overrated, and how this admittedly beautifully designed children's movie was treated with baffling reverence by adults showing a misplaced, sentimental loyalty to their earlier, 12-year-old selves.
Instead it gave grave owners two months to remove any non-authorised items they wished to keep.
Weed and soil scientists are giving grave warnings as to the effects of GMO crops on the escalating use of chemicals in agriculture.
A prominent tradition is that of the ship burial, where the deceased was laid in a boat, or a stone ship, and given grave offerings in accordance with his earthly status and profession, sometimes including sacrificed slaves.
I do think that E. E. Cummings gives Graves a serious challenge, though I know that many sound people dismiss Cummings's love poetry outright, as self-congratulatory and goopy.
Françoise Sagan's "Bonjour Tristesse", published in 1954, for instance, opens with the 17-year-old Cécile's lament:A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow.
Mr Blunkett grew up blind, in dreadful Sheffield poverty, the son of a factory foreman who died in a factory accident and whose family did not have enough money to give his grave a headstone.
The use of such language, and the nature of the public statements as a whole, give us grave concern about our chances of receiving an impartial and fair hearing".
