"The Ministry of Special Cases" lives up to its title: its characters are so sweet, so literary in antecedent, that they seem exceptions to the grim rules of historical catastrophe.
It's something to think about over the next five years of inevitably grim Tory rule.
But the Tories staged a recovery and Mr Brown ducked the election, a political ignominy from which he has never recovered.In Brighton, two years and a recession later, a grim realism ruled.
("Grim little rules" like the one against using "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, he writes, make no sense — hey, Shakespeare did it — but laymen cling to it "like Linus to his blanket").
The visually stunning video depicts a grim future ruled by robots, an Earth surrounded by broken down satellites and space shuttles with a massive digital sign in orbit reading, "Buy Swag - Feel Fear - Feel Guilt".
Vocabulary: outlaws, militias, roughed up, emboldened, ignited, deterioration, straightforward, jockeying, deceptively, loping, swoops, raping, pillaging, root out, sympathizers, displaced, strongholds, cultivate, hoed, groundnuts, genocide, looted, grim, congregate, hamstrung, rules of engagement, ambushed, spikes, spoils, traumatized, lawless Extension Activities: 1.
In a crisis where the alternatives are grim, the usual rules of safety and caution are relaxed.
During the Soviet occupation of the 1980s and the grim years of Taliban rule in the later 1990s, millions of Afghans fled their country.
Indeed, I'm tempted to call The Long Earth an exercise in utopian writing; an unfashionable mode nowadays, when grim-and-gritty dystopias rule the publishing roost.
