Nothing is more dangerous to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library. - Robertson Davies

I cannot imagine any boy of spirit who would not be delighted to play a drunkard — even to vomiting — in front of his Sunday school. Indeed, the vomiting might be the chief attraction of the role.

Once it was the fashion to represent villages as places inhabited by laughable, livable simpletons, unspotted by the worldliness of city life, though occasionally shrewd in rural concerns. Later it was the popular thing to show villages as rotten with vice, and especially such sexual vice...incest, sodomy, bestiality, sadism, and masochism were supposed to rage behind lace curtains and in the haylofts, while a rigid piety was professed in the streets.

— Nature and nurture are inextricable; only scientists and psychologists could think otherwise, and we know all about them, don't we? — We should. We've watched them since they were tribal wizards, yelping around the campfire. ...