Do ideals, symbols and beliefs lead people to act as they do? Or are the wellsprings of action and the drivers of history less ethereal: money, fear, the thirst for power, circumstance and opportunity, with culture as an afterthought? Scholars in the first camp are culturalists; in the second, materialists.

I was simply making the prosaic point that we are running late.

'They warned me off you and Lawrence because they reckoned you were a couple of chutney ferrets after my arse. […]

The angular defect clearly has something to do with curvature, because the larger it is, the more pointed the surface is at the vertex.