"Great wickedness," defines Webster's New World dictionary, its example "the enormity of a crime".
Institutionalised racism is America's great wickedness, and it remains braided through everyday American life, but its salience has faded for most.
It is entirely characteristic of Hoffman to find "sturdy cheerfulness" a virtue in a man who had been on the side of great wickedness.
The whole thing, he seemed to believe, was their fault, though he also asked "whether a zeal, governed by blindness and passion, and led by precedent, has not herein precipitated us into far greater wickedness (if not witchcrafts) than any have yet been proved against those that suffered".
Or will the arrival of Frankenknight (Qyburn's creation from the corpse of Gregor Clegane, now known as "Ser Robert Strong"), send her down the villain's path to even greater wickedness?
The awful truth is that the response most great writing about wickedness provokes in us is neither "Yes please," nor "No thanks," but "You too?" The collapse of genre boundaries has laid different forms of expression open to attack, on the basis (partly) of often wilful misunderstandings of how they work and what they do.
Yet Bresson — who was eighty-two years old when the film came out, and clearly in no mood for mellowing — frames the acts of wickedness, both great and small, with a terrifying calm.
Takahiro Sakaeda, the chef who prepared two of my meals, paced the evenings with the studied wickedness of a great D.J. or playwright, building acts into the meal, replete with turning points, subplots and rising action.
God sees that "the wickedness of man was great in the earth".
For the earl of Clarendon, royalist chronicler of "the Great Rebellion", Cromwell "had all the wickedness against which damnation is denounced, and for which hell-fire is prepared, so he had some virtues which have caused the memory of some men in all ages to be celebrated; and he will be looked upon by posterity as a brave, bad man".
Impertinently, I asked, "While he was outside it, or inside?" She rewarded me with the great laugh and accused me of "dangerous wickedness".
