One private in a Michigan regiment noted the "men in ancient raiment, unshaved and unwashed … One look at such a grotesque group was enough to make one doubt his mother country".
If you want grotesque, look (bizarrely enough) to the show's star, James Barbour, who portrays the worthy but dissolute Sydney Carton, he of the "far, far better thing" spiel.
As they hopscotch from pawn shop to whore house and beyond, Mr. Armfield invests their progressively bleak spaces and situations with a grungy patina that somehow never seems dirty enough, filthy enough, grotesque enough.
As if all that wasn't grotesque enough, most of profitable Royal Mail has now been privatised by the supposedly dissident Vince Cable.
There's an incident of ultra-violence near the end of the first season, and I'm going to describe it, because it's the fulcrum on which the show pivots; it's also grotesque enough that fans of the books wondered how the show's producers would handle it.
In the past, VICE has been lucky enough to have the gloriously grotesque images from Toilet Paper, his collaborative magazine with photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari, grace the cover and pages of our print edition.
In the past, VICE has been lucky enough to have the gloriously grotesque images from Toilet Paper, his collaborative magazine with photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari, grace the cover and pages of our print edition.
Those of us unfortunate enough to be afflicted with idiocy are not grotesque caricatures or figures of fun.
Its heroes have a touch of Todd McFarlane about them, a cavalcade of hulking grotesques, mechanical monstrosities and buff bodies; it would be easy enough to imagine them adorning the shelves of a comic book shop as collectors' action figures.
Batman's grotesque opponents may be larger than life, but they're never large enough to overshadow his own persona, particularly as it was redefined by Frank Miller in the mid-1980s.
