For their part, New Yorkers made a show of disdaining him at dinner parties for his bullying ways and pitiless programs, but they slept better knowing that Rudy was wrestling the city's myriad demons.
He writes perfectly and with a warm, twinkling-eyed generosity toward human behavior that does not get in the way of his pitiless observation of it.
But it is at least heartening to discover that natural selection, despite its pitiless motivations, has found a way to reward nurturing parents.
Made with found materials, it uses telephone poles, chains, animal bones and a truck fender with a Texas license plate to delineate an immense rectilinear volume -- a horrible emptiness -- in a way that is casual, pitiless and for all its obviousness, quite resonant.
"The way of the sword is pitiless," Jiaxin tells her charge, but Yinniang has such sad music in her soul that her empathy cannot be obliterated or overcome.
Greyish trees and rock-mounds at dusk still make me wonder uneasily if svart-alfar might be about, and I don't think anything has ever scared me in quite the same way as the noseless, brainless, pitiless mara – scent-hunting troll-women like green columns of wet stone.
The actor David Hayman, performing in The Pitiless Storm, about a Labour activist uncertain which way to vote, took questions after the show.
And like the many men before him guilty of pitiless crimes against humanity, he acted in a way that begs us to consider the relationship between such violence and his notions of manhood.
Lately, however, Jacobson and Spencer have taken up evangelizing — and the sermon, delivered day after day to fellow conservatives in the form of a 61-point presentation, is a pitiless we-told-you-so elucidation of the ways in which Democrats have overwhelmed Republicans with their technological superiority.
The rumpled, cozy Britain of the postwar decades, the Britain of the Ealing comedies, of the Goon Show and Wallace & Gromit, gave way, amid riots and tumult, to a Britain of pitiless dynamism and poisonous inequality.
