This self-destructive act of autosodomy is the most powerful symbol in the novel for what is the essence of Cela's judgement on the Civil War: the sterile orgasm of a perverted national psyche.

His [Lucan's] wit, ſays Ablancourt, was full of urbanity, that Attic ſalt which the French call fine raillery; not obſcene, not groſs, not rude, but facetious, well-mannered, and well-bred.

I was once, I remember, called to a patient who had received a violent contusion in his tibia, by which the exterior cutis was lacerated, so that there was a profuse sanguinary discharge […]

silent revisions; a silent emendation