By dying from an overdose, he became just another statistic.

There was no tedious self-righteousness on the night of the gala event. The charity auction invited bids for a night out at the Windmill Club (a lapdancing venue in Soho) and a course of plastic surgery, offered as an opportunity to “Add spice to your wife”

Mrs. McLash was dressed for travelling. She wore a black lustre skirt that just exposed her broken button-boots […]

There were not then, as now, upon some of them, great dead trees reaching out their long bare arms in verdureless desolation above a stinted undergrowth, and piled up trunks charred and blackened by the fire that had revelled among them, but all were green, and thrifty, and glorious in their robes of beauty.