F.R. Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel--for theeighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions--did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.

Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

Losing their names, these things underwent a process of uncreation.

There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.

I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one.

Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with

Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.