Culture

In modern civilisation, by contrast, it is hard to say what children are for. They don't work, for example, and some of them are not particularly decorative.

Like many a literary émigré to British shores, Wilde set about the task of reinventing himself, becoming plus anglais que les anglais, mimicking his hosts at the same time as he mocked them.

Language begins life as a kind of poetry, ripe, robust and richly flavoured, but grows enervated and anaemic the more civilisation declines into empty refinement - or, in a word, into Frenchness.