In former days every tavern of repute kept such a room for its own select circle, a club, or society, of habitués, who met every evening, for a pipe and a cheerful glass.[…]Strangers might enter the room, but they were made to feel that they were there on sufferance: they were received with distance and suspicion.

We got off the bus at Main Street, which was no different from where you get off a bus in Kansas City or Chicago or Boston—red brick, dirty, characters drifting by, trolleys grating in the hopeless dawn, the whorey smell of a big city.

He was[…] none of your free-and-easy companions, who would scrape their boots upon the firedogs in the common room, […]

Instead England produced something that felt a little transgressive in this most controlled of stages, tightening their grip in a bruising first half, before freewheeling downhill in the second with their feet up on the handlebars.