Describing Athens amid the death-agonies of the Peloponnesian war, Hughes comments that it "must have been reminiscent of Kabul 2002-10: ragged, war-torn, veiled women in the streets with no husbands, brothers or sons".
Many have learned how their own parents and grandparents suffered as refugees once, and that it was only by taking in that ragged flood of the war-torn and homeless, wounded and despairing, that the country began to heal itself.
But NATO is far from winning the war, and the ragged Afghan insurgents seem to have more staying power than the West's mighty alliance.As defence ministers prepare to meet in the Netherlands on October 24th, NATO itself is looking shaky.
China's long-term America strategy has always been to benefit economically from us and wait patiently while we run ourselves ragged in a costly ongoing war and milk ourselves dry through rampant overspending.
With wooden panels concealing the gilt of a grand hotel, Roland Mouret turned his design eyes on a postwar world in the 1945-47 period — the freezing winter in a war-weary and ragged Paris — yet indomitable fashion rising up as Dior's New Look.
If so, this is the phony war stage: homemade banners, ragged organisation, no one quite sure what to expect.
WASHINGTON — Standing in Al Faw palace in Baghdad, surrounded by an artificial lake and the ragged remnants of eight years of war, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. felt a surge of emotion on that day in December 2011.
Herakles, meanwhile – who's stood, frozen in myth, as an icon of youth and strength for millennia – reappears as Sad But Great, a broken war veteran; PTSD-ravaged, "ragged eyes pouring in/ every direction".
Walking to the Strand along Beach Road, holding tightly to my grandmother's hand, the skyline of the empty docks gaped ragged still from the bombs, the war was with us both, but absent from the reality of my own life.
The setting is the Arizona territory after the Civil War, a wilderness with towns so ragged and insubstantial that they seem merely scratched onto the surface of the desert.
I've trudged over the sand and dust of the building sites of Beijing with their tens of thousands of migrant labourers looking like warring medieval armies working under their ragged flying banners.
