I am afraid his history on the advent of pan latrines or what is better known to 'thoroughbred colonials' as Thunder Boxes was rather wanting; and I don't blame him. […] [W]ell after the end of the Second World War some boarding schools in Cape Coast were still using thunder boxes.

In the Leviathan, Hobbes could only represent the pre-civil as the anti-civil, as that which lacked in every respect what was considered important in civil society.

Paula's shop, by contrast, had room sets behind its vast sheet of plate glass, a bedroom, or a sitting room with cushions and curtains in white linen to show off the dark wood of the furniture, and tropical ferns and grasses sprouting brilliantly out of pots that might, just might, have once graced a Balinese temple.

I’m putting in my two cents here, and I’m doing so with intentional bluntness; no offense intended to anyone. I’m also on a major pain-killer (naughty appendix, gone now), so please forgive any non sequituri.