He snatches away the piece of sacking that is supposed to retain the caloric in the loins of his horse, goes through a series of evolutions in order to bring his cab alongside the kerb-stone, a process which could not be adequately described without the aid of diagrams, and which the uninitiated might consider was for the purpose of driving the horse in at the open door of the vehicle, instead of putting the passenger there.

The dishwater drained away slowly.

Glazer echoes the lament of his friend and collaborator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for the Westway project, supposedly a victim of New York’s “regulatory and litigatory maze.”

This brings us to fertility-challenged Japan, which is in the midst of a demographic crisis and has become something of a case study in the dangers of sexlessness.