I wrote of murders, tortures, and rapes in a spare manner because a flat tone conveys agony better than a herd of adjectives.
A soldier who wrote of murdering immigrants and who praised Adolf Hitler has been jailed for two years after building a viable nailbomb packed with 181 pieces of shrapnel to maximise the carnage it would cause.
"I conclude there was collusion in both murders and the circumstances surrounding them," he wrote of the murder of Finucane and Brian Lambert, a Protestant mistakenly targeted in 1987.Finucane, 38 at the time of his murder, had been at the forefront of arguing that suspects detained under anti-terror legislation were being held in conditions that violated their human rights.
Kimberly Sorensen wrote of the murder of her 26 year old son at the hands of a 17 year old, "After Dan died, that vile boy said, 'He sure made a mess' and proceeded to use Dan's severed head as a puppet.
When Mr. Ellroy writes of sleaze, conspiracy, corruption and murder (as he frequently has, most famously in "L.A. Confidential," "My Dark Places" and "The Cold Six Thousand"), he revels in this stuff.
Helen Bray, the society's American representative, narrated a slide show that included biographies ("After their mother died, the children turned inward and wrote tales of murder, mayhem, war and adultery"), rapturous Brontë poems ("For the moors, for the moors, where the short grass like velvet beneath us should lie!"), and a color photograph of the sofa on which Emily died.
Fry wrote of Russia: "Beatings, murders and humiliations are ignored by the police.
De Schelking writes: The murder of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his wife produced widespread shock across Europe, and there was initially much sympathy for the Austrian position.
They also turned up 14 notebooks in which Mrs. Kimes, whose son had rented an apartment in Mrs. Silverman's house in 1998, wrote of her plan to murder the wealthy socialite, dispose of her body, then assume her identity and steal her town house, which is valued at $7.7 million.
Her particular feminism, while offending some, was not forged from philosophical doctrine, but from the realistic observations of the men and women around her. "Ours indeed was a land of shame," she wrote, "a land of murder, and a land of strange, throttled, sacrificial women".
