"There have also been reports that the vehicles are being shipped by barges on the Pearl River," one dispatch read gravely, "north to some unknown destination".
It begins cinematically, with excerpts from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's D-Day prayer read gravely over period footage, then delivers a series of greatest-hits encounters across France, through Belgium, and into Germany.
You say gravely, bring me to hospital.
"Regardless of whether people agree with or abhor Nambla's views," the A.C.L.U. said in a statement yesterday, "holding the organization responsible for crimes committed by others who read their material would gravely endanger our important First Amendment freedoms".
I was gravely disappointed to read about the closing of Sari Nusseibeh's office in Jerusalem ("The Wrong Target," editorial, July 11).
Strongly autobiographical and gravely moral, her books were widely read in both East and West Germany, and over the years she became respected as a kind of public conscience of a long-divided people.
Last year, 20 leading writers, including Hare, Frayn, Boyd and Stoppard, wrote to the Daily Telegraph to say they were "gravely concerned about the impact of this judgment on the freedom to read and write in Britain".
And then comes the section that the ACLU and Lambda Legal Defense should read most carefully; First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate.
Hemingway had the satisfaction of reading his obituary notices in the papers, and the Pope, after being gravely ill, had the satisfaction of watching an issue of Life perform a hasty flip-flop because of the return of his vital forces.
But his newsstand, visually speaking, remains a model of the art form, an orderly, beckoning cornucopia of maps, guides, reading glasses, clocks, diaries, souvenir medallions, playing cards and other tourist paraphernalia, amid the various archaeology numbers, foreign newsweeklies, lads' magazines ("they don't sell like they used to," he noted gravely) and Italian dailies.
