Sublime

in his final death-driven surge towards ‘the big picture’.

great gloom

Martin Amis’s The Information,

(‘a miserable mediocrity’).

in obscure disgrace;

America’s elaborately doctored well-being.

‘among the wrongs and relics of her seventy years’.

He would then proceed to startle and goad the earnest and morose, briskly crushing their fashionable and half-baked preconceptions.