The plot, meanwhile, is readily acknowledged to be a "scarcely credible sequence of disasters".
In another section of the anti-EU movement, Ukip and its leader Nigel Farage stumbled their way through a sequence of disasters without actually falling flat on their faces.
Winston Churchill's life spanned the last decades of the British Empire, and to read Carlo D'Este's enjoyable new biography is to recall the sequence of disasters that befell Britain between the final days of the Victorian era and its brush with extinction in World War II.
Nor is this strategy unique to the European avant-garde: Michael Frayn's delicious theatre-themed farce, Noises Off, devotes the second of its three acts to a sustained sequence of disasters backstage, the result a slapstick ballet that takes place with scarcely a word.
While a surge in herd sizes during a decade of good weather and booming demand for meat weakened the region's pastures, the immediate crisis was set off by an extraordinary sequence of natural disasters.
"The perfect storm of a financial collapse, loss of the Soviets as trading partner, a sequence of meteorologic disasters, and sanctions has left the health care system in shambles," said Ricky Choi, a US doctor who co-authored a recent paper on healthcare in North Korea.
The changes in river management and work practices in Korea may be best explained with a chronologically progressing sequence of 'Natural', 'Disaster-prevention', 'Occupied', 'Park', and 'Close-to-nature' rivers.
The disaster sequence, of course, is not the Success Sequence.
Open image in new window Fig. 2 BCG Matrix and optimum cash flow strategy of the BCG and success and disaster sequence of the BCG approach.
Rather, it's been a kind of disaster management — a sequence of bomb-defusal operations that have prevented our dysfunctional government from tipping into outright crisis.
