The time had come, it seemed, to reclaim "Il Trovatore," a famously easy target of parody, as a great, grim and deeply humane work of musical drama.
This may be a portrait of an Ireland that no longer exists - as outdated in its way as, say, the Dublin of Dubliners, or the great grim dance-hall Ireland portrayed by William Trevor.
They've offered fractured stories (The Wonderful World of Dissocia), gruesome deaths (Relocated), unexplained switches of place and time, great grim glimmers, wilful obfuscations (always), a practice of devising during rehearsal (Neilson is a directing dramatist) and of leaving work (including titles) open till the last moment.
They really knew how to torture in those days, far less pleasantly even than the excruciating scenes in the great, grim George Clooney movie, Syriana.
I had thought this kind of comedy was more or less dead until the David Haye-Nikolai Valuev fight on Sky Box Office on Saturday, which was essentially the old story of the little fellow ducking and dodging some hulking great grim-faced opponent.
The government disturbs that normalisation at everyone's great and grim peril.
It might not sound like the greatest television: grim, Goole, gloomy, grumpy.
Wharton called Harry, who was a graduate of Harvard Law School and later was involved in the governance of Harvard, "the great & grim brother".
Dr. William B. Karesh, a veterinarian with the Wildlife Conservation Society, who has studied Ebola in Central Africa and who was also not in the group that wrote the paper, called the situation for great apes "grim".
And by those standards, whom do they rank among the great and the grim?
