One finishes with new appreciation for the power of the idea of "Martians", not much diminished even now that we have robots trundling around up there.
The Southern conservative wing of the Democratic Party, for generations a power in the region and on Capitol Hill, is now much diminished.
Ideas abound as to why this should be so: the Bogart-cum-Garbo glamour of the thing (now much diminished); the comfort of having one's own little campfire; the reassuring ritual of matches, lighters, and finger play; and so on.
Mr Rasai hinted that Mr Mashai and the Green Movement, albeit now much diminished, may be working in sinister concert; after all, he pointed out, both are "uncommitted to the Guardianship of the Jurist".Reverence for the hidden imam has long been an accepted part of Shia Islam, but millenarian zeal has produced schismatics in the past the Bahais, for instance, who are now banned and persecuted.
But for the aerospace giants, hydrogen's appeal is now much diminished, and the emphasis seems to be on making fossil fuels go further.
These newspapers, many now dead or much diminished, saw themselves as voices of the people, a concept that today sounds almost quaint.
A peak in recurrence rates around year 2 for oestrogen receptor-positive breast cancer had been seen in older studies, but this is very much diminished in more recent studies, where now the recurrence rate is roughly constant for at least 10 years.
But in the dock on Friday, he seemed much diminished — the swagger gone, his speech slurred, the feared warrior now an infirm and elderly man.
The channels of media communication are now so much more diverse, and people's trust of the press much diminished.
The hostility between universities, many of them now dependent on federal funding, and the military, with the draft long over, is much diminished.
