Now that I put on my glasses I could see that the hut was empty but for our two selves; that it must have been absolutely empty till we entered.

He said to himself that no doubt they would save her; the doctors would discover some remedy surely. He remembered all the miraculous cures he had been told about. Then she appeared to him dead. She was there; before his eyes, lying on her back in the middle of the road. He reined up, and the hallucination disappeared.

Finally, McLuhanism is ambiguous on the post-modern ‘reversal’ in which reality is construed as a textual, symbolic and absent construction rather than the immediate existence and ‘givenness’ to experience that common sense and empiricism assume is foundational, even if open to debate.

To the fashionable world he cannot be a stranger […] and his having married a sister of the Duke of Leeds is a voucher for my assertion.