"The realisation is gradually dawning that I have to walk a very, very, very long way, with many days back-to- back using only my poor little legs to carry me, and that's a gruesome thought".
Only in America, as the song says — only in America are there enough mass shootings in a single week to allow pundits and philosophers to make complicated points about the nature of responsibility and guilt that elsewhere might exist only in the realm of gruesome thought experiments.
Packed with fascinating insights into the medical practices of the time, including experiments on guillotined heads, Johnson's novel is pacy, gruesome and thought-provoking.
This private message was gruesome, detailed and thought-out by an adult male.
Another slightly more gruesome – I mean, er, thought-provoking book is Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
Do you rip the muscle right off the bone?" Pound seemed to like the thought of this gruesome image.
"But the depiction of thousands of sick and dying people seemed rather gruesome for our light-hearted film, and the thought of our crew taking a 600-year round trip just to bring back a snail darter wasn't all that thrilling," explained Nimoy.
At the end, after the great quietness of the preparations for departure, just as Tolstoy has distracted us with thoughts of love, his hero's bloody and gruesome end comes as a shock.
My colleague Steven Erlanger sent these thoughts to The Lede: Marie Colvin would always turn up in the most gruesome places and make them brighter.
My initial thoughts on why I would choose to spend so many hours of my life absorbed in these gruesome narratives is that perhaps I'm learning how to prevent them from happening to myself.
