querulous

Against a long and attenuated trill of the viola, Mehretu’s backgrounds become a lurid green or mysterious blue and the black lines of the paintings start to look more querulous.

The British novelist Hilary Mantel, who died on Thursday at age 70, left a wide-ranging and hard-to-classify body of work that encompassed memoir, story collections, contemporary novels and brilliant, querulous literary essays.

Snarky and sometimes rude, the verse drama tells of a querulous prince stepping anxiously into the spotlight.

One came across as a quiet, reserved, eloquent, thoughtful force of nature; the other as a boisterous, querulous, troublemaking and sometimes thoughtless and mean force of nature.

But were senior party figures to try this, Mr. Johnson might threaten to call a snap general election, preferring his chances of winning a contest among voters to one among his querulous lawmakers.