It was not until the 1970s that Robert O. Paxton's book, "Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944," and movies like Marcel Ophüls's "The Sorrow and the Pity," began undermining this myth.
The rhetoric of pity, which began in the 1980s, "is something which every educated African finds great, great offence in".
It seems a pity to begin discussion of a Group One race by talking about a possible draw bias but, following Friday's Commonwealth Cup over the same strip of ground, it really does look as though horses racing towards the far side of the home straight have an advantage.
But the years of being smugly pitied have begun to rile even the most gentle of Mets fans.
Someone who sympathized?" The boss quickly veered from denial to abject self-pity, and began pestering the salesman for scuttlebutt and support: "What are they saying about me on the floor?" The boss, called in by his bosses to discuss which of his charges he'd fire, had picked up on chatter that he'd go down himself, which would mean death for the salesman.
Then Gloucester, the "grumbling crookback prodigy" with "neither pity, love, nor fear", begins to emerge as Richard III.
All this is a pity because when he begins putting over the raw stuff of Somali experience the novel and the language itself tighten up and come alive.
"The Pity of It All" begins with the precocious young Moses Mendelssohn, soon to be the father of the Jewish Enlightenment, at the gates of mid-18th-century Berlin.
The juror of the title is the book's too-good-to-be-true noble character: Miss Callie Ruffin, the elderly black woman who takes pity on Willie and begins inviting him over at mealtimes.
