It was an oppression probably harsher than any in Eastern Europe, a harshness whose peculiar quality was its pervasive, impenetrable obscurity.
"You claimed us not to need it," Lucy said, a harshness in her voice he'd not heard before.
To detractors, his often boisterous stewardship of the project reflects a more complicated picture - one that mixes drive, intelligence and appealing bluntness with egomania, ruthlessness and a harshness in dealing with underlings.
Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic, wrote in The New York Times that $40 million of public money had been squandered to create "a building that has a harshness almost unequaled in contemporary architecture".
His work, "La Devinette d'Arlequin," seemed less the riddle of its title than a busy, marchlike exercise in calculated harshness — an impression multiplied by the instrumental hedonism pursued by most everyone else on Friday.
The painting is regarded as an example of his subtle humor expressed as "gestural swathes rendered in commercial harshness as a parody of action painting".
The resulting conflict is largely played for laughs, with nods to Woody Allen, but there is a rude harshness in Delpy's approach, a taste for close confrontation, which both sours and enlivens what might otherwise have drifted into an easygoing comedy of manners.
To make clear: OK, we all know there is a pecking order here, and language is harsh, and the way they characterize each other is harsh, but the truth surmounts the harshness, in a way.
But the rush to catch up, combined with official nerves rattled by the Arab Spring (or, in Iraq's case, its sectarian conflict), has produced a swathe of bad legislation.Lebanon's government is considering an internet law that, says Ms Maher, is similar to Iraq's in breadth, if not in harshness.
Others were saying that his performance was typical in its harshness; he had devastated his wife in a public forum.
