While war has never been absent from the ____ of man, there have been periods in History which appear remarkably ____.

Virginia Woolf _______ conventional notions of truth: in her words, one cannot receive from any lecture "a nugget of pure truth" to wrap up between the pages of one's notebook and keep on the mantelpiece forever.

The pond was a place of reek and corruption, of ____ smells and of oxygen-starved fish breathing through laboring gills.