Facing an unrelieved bloody conflict with the Palestinians, and the daunting idea that peace with their Arab neighbours is a pipedream, more and more Israelis refer to an existential threat to their lives.
The programmes on Russia's two main television stations, ORT and RTR, offer an unrelieved diet of biased and tendentious coverage, sometimes reminiscent of the Soviet propaganda machine but oiled in the style of western television commercials.
In the 1860s, Florence Nightingale advocated outcome measurement in terms of whether patients were "dead, relieved or unrelieved".
In a much-noticed essay in 2004, Sadik Al-Azm, a professor of philosophy at the University of Damascus, said the modern Arabs had become "the Hamlet of our times, doomed to unrelieved tragedy, forever hesitating, procrastinating and wavering between the old and the new".
English education, Mr McKibbin finds, was a virtually unrelieved failure in this period, with a ruinously mediocre and divisive record.
Yet the gloom is by no means unrelieved.
So is his past reputation for unrelieved colourlessness.
The press regularly carries stories of abandoned plots and unrelieved misery on settlements established by the government.Rates of failure vary, however, and the overall record is not that bleak.
In two early dreamlike novels, La Belle Bête (1959; Mad Shadows) and Tête blanche (1960), Blais stakes out her territory working-class people doomed territory working-classd opeopleion.
But despite a gradually worsening military situation, unrelieved internal political tensions, continuing lack of manpower and armament, and skyrocketing inflation, he remained resolute in his determination to carry on the war, and Lee remained both his most valuable field commander and his most loyal personal supporter.
Drawing comparisons to James Joyce's works, Self's roughly 400 pages of stream of consciousness contain multiple perspectives, inventive wordplay, unannounced time shifts, and paragraphs lasting 10 pages, all unrelieved by a chapter break.
