Nobody could now think that about the city: London is a place of immense, sometimes overwhelming variety, colour and energy, and with an edge of anger never far away.
With its overwhelming richness, its colour and warmth, Pedro Almodóvar's new movie is set to capture your heart.
Naturally, this overwhelming lack of colour is reflected in the state's presidential politics: White people made up 99percentnt of Iowa Republican caucus voters in the last two presidential elections; Democrats were only slightly more diverse in 2008.
Last Friday, I read out the names of the 271 transgender people reported to have been murdered in the past year, and the overwhelming majority were of colour.
Still, overwhelming is overwhelming.
Most people react to India with an overwhelming sense of the colours and the brashness of its imagery and you would have thought that Hodgkin, with his sense of bold colour and fierce brushwork, would have gone for the same.
The overwhelming evidence, shown in BBC colour footage of the horrific scene, contrary to the lurid, defamatory tales spun afterwards by the police, was of Liverpool supporters heroically helping.
This is rather remarkably given the overwhelming amount of research on coloration and colour change in skin, as pointed out in a recent review (Nilsson Sköld et al., 2013).
"Now racism is the province of a few kooks, while the overwhelming majority of Americans of all colours agree on the sacredness of equality and vote twice for a black president to underscore it," she writes.
It can be expressed in many colours, from discreet decency to overwhelming altruism, subtle grace to deepest tenderness.
