squalors

Youth and beauty have their privileges, among them being the ability and agility to roll out into the hazy dawn following the squalors of the night before and still possess the throwaway glamour of a Bryan Ferry song.

Hollywood's Next Wave Wolcott, James 2008

Gaza and the West Bank are squalors of humanity acting as giant prisons, where dense refugee camps are considered cities, their perimeters encircled by fences, walls, Israeli tanks and the ever watchful eyes of trigger-friendly snipers.

Israel's Moral Decay / It's Time For Action 2008

The realism, as it is called, that deals only with the banalities and squalors of life, and weaves into the mesh of its story no character but would make you yawn if you passed ten minutes with him in a railway – carriage, might well take a lesson from this man, if it had the brains.

Robert Louis Stevenson 2004

One thing that is very noticeable is that the worst squalors are never downstairs.

The Road to Wigan Pier 2004

Oddly, though, the tone is not triumphant; no – in the 90's we hear the querulous voice of Bloom besieged, a lone champion of aesthetic value lashing out against "our current squalors."

Reading Against the Clock: Belated Bloom Suffers Nobly 2000

She also learns of a no less peculiar regime which obtains in an Ulster castle, where, in bitter isolation, amid the subsistence-level squalors and hardships which literature loves to ascribe to the Irish landed gentry, her father's mother, Great Granny Webster's daughter, has gone off her head and supposed herself in the confidence of the fairies.

Ladies in Distress Miller, Karl 1978

I forgot petty squalors and enjoyed things — the coy tremble of the tiller and the backwash of air from the dingy mainsail, and, with a somewhat chastened rapture, the lunch which Davies brought up to me and solicitously watched me eat.

The Riddle of the Sands Childers, Erskine, 1870-1922 1955

The noon-day sun beat down, eliciting abominable stenches and revealing, without compromise, the ugly squalors of the region.

Recollections With Photogravure Portrait of the Author and a number of Original Letters, of which one by George Meredith and another by Robert Louis Stevenson are reproduced in facsimile David Christie Murray

One thing that is very noticeable is that the worst squalors are never downstairs.

The Road to Wigan Pier 1937

"Yes, but no brave nation would submit one day to such petty squalors after it was shown the way to escape them".

The Lord of the Sea 1906