ghastliness

Shostakovich takes Katerina’s side in this ghastliness, pushing his opera beyond the bounds of theatrical convention to make a point about amoral responses to amorality.

Before he bestrode the continent and prefigured the ghastliness of modern European history — religious impulses sublimated in politics — Napoleon Bonaparte was an artillery captain.

Yet even with the grimness and ghastliness of war, gestures of hope and kindness are shining brightly for refugees who are crossing the border into these countries.

But these are gimmicks that result in a ginned-up ghastliness that equates the crisis of endangered kids with the nightmare of a dying phone battery.

Yet as Kossakovsky reminds us, even as he spares us the ghastliness of the slaughterhouse, we need to look at animals to honestly see what we have done.