Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

Thus, Krause corpuscles, which are particularly dense in the clitoris, are vibrotactile sensors crucial for normal sexual behavior.

pederosis - a man's sexual abuse of a girl (invented by Nabokov)

charshaf -  a simple, loose over-garment, essentially a robe-like dress

anent - concerning, about

"Did you know he married one his students?"...."It happens sometimes"

"It's easy to imagine [Plough] sinking to his knees, lowering his head into my lap, not to lament how he will inevitably ruin me but instead to mourn that another man has." - age specific attraction reduced to a concern for virginity, has Plough already ruined his own attraction to his wife?

"I learn things about myself: that if I limit myself to five hours of sleep, I'm too tired to care what happens around me; if I wait until dinnertime to eat, hunger pains drown out any other feelings. - In Krasnodar, I learnt half a bottle of gin could have the same effect, I learnt to treasure my hangovers.

"He gave me books before ever I gave him poems. He was the one who said he wanted to kiss me good night, that my hair was the color of red maple leaves. That all happened before I even realized what was really going on." - in the end she fails to realise that she was played.

"I drape my arm across my eyes, fall into swirls of color, ocean waves rising to mountains, the sensation of being so small until I come, harder than when I do it to myself, so hard I see stars" - unsettlingly violent?

"I suspect that we'll see a fall in the numbers of British pupils going to private schools, as wealthy parents work out that the fortunes they are paying in fees may actually hamper their kids chances of getting into Oxbridge." - introduction of taxation of private schools should accelerate this, more foreign pupils pushing up fees, pressure for the government to invest in state schools.

"The dilettiantish Oxford I knew has been replaced with something quite professional and money driven" - the public schools too? Taunton's Oxbridge places?

"I'm sure they didn't percieive this as corrupt. They just needed solutions urgently...Class solidarity kicked in." - why then the cover ups?

"I [Rory Stewart] feel their is a deep lack of seriousness in British politics...the people debating are not asking serious questions" - Journalists included. In what way did people like Paxman undermine the publics perception that politics was a serious business?

"Admittedly, the comparision between the Cambridge and Oxford sets isn't entirely fair: though both betrayed Britain's interests in the service of Moscow, the Brexiteers did it by mistake" - again no analysis of the foreign interests in the outcome of Brexit.

"In the end, Cummings focused the Leave campaign on two issues that many ordinary Britons did care about: immigration and the National Health Service" - should be much more about the demand side of Brexit.

"Brexit was...it was an anti-elitist revolt led by an elite: a coup by one set of Oxford public school boys against [an]other, backed by an Australian Oxford public schoolboy media magnet masquerading as an anti-elitist" - Murdoch was at an Australian grammar school, did study PPE at Oxford, but was a member of the Oxford University Labour Party.

"But when Cameron demoted him to chief whip, in 2014 lopping £30,000 off his salary on top him everything else. Gove was devastated." - ouch!

"...whereas their predecessors like Ken Clarke and Dennis Healey had been regulars at European get-togethers, even the most Europhile of the present generation didn't make those trips". I remember Cameron touring Europe trying to get some support for Britain before he called the Brexit referendum.

"You'd have some parliamentary committees that would have considered [Brexit]. You'd have a ton of work done. You'd have several years of informed debate...and people can vote at the least with some information. "

Politics to [Cameron's establishment] is the incremental refinement of the mixed economy in a world where most young people agree on most things...they were unprepared for the surge in Euroscepticism, nativism, violent fanaticism and great power rivalry"

"Etonians never actually left the Tory high command. They were just tactically moved away from front of stage. Even as I [Adonis] was predicting their demise, an astounding sixty-one Etonians served as ministers in the Thatcher/Major governments." - as a %?

"There's a kind of person who goes through a bit of a young fogey phase when the leave home for the first time' - well it was my second phase, after my anarcho-punk-hippy phase, chiefly inspired by Jeeves and Wooster, rather than Brideshead revisited.

"For me in 1990 it was very clear that the primary motive force for the democratic revolutions in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Rumania [sic] or whatever was ending the foreign occupation of their country" - the rest of us, however, thought that system change was primary motive force, hence the rush into the EU and NATO. Julia remarks that these young soldiers far away from home didn't look like oppressors.

"First I lost my husband, then my son. I don't want anyone else to lose theirs in such a pointless war, fought for such alien principles." - she can't be talking about reversing Trianon, what alien principles are these - Naziism?

"Abigail was lying!" - well, yes: the theme of misrepresentation runs all through the book, and explores when it morally good to lie, to whom and about what.

"In any work of literature, the most interesting bits are in the detail," - how to read this novel, tips from the author.

"She knew that when the front reached Árkod no wall in the Matula would be thick enough, no cellar sufficiently secure." - my mother-in-law hiding in the cellar when the Russians came to Tetétlen.

"What upset [Kalmár] him now was that once again Vitay, his favourite, would have to be punished." - hard to believe that Gini would be his favourite, she's hardly 'motor' material.

"But those revelations lay in the distant future. What the immediate future held for Gina was the winter of 1944." - and we all now what happened to Hungary then. These flashforwards are the most striking literary device this novel uses, especially for one so dependent on a big denouement".

"...she had witnessed another of those miraculous little scenarios at which the Matula was so adept: nothing had happened at all, or, if anything had, it was of no importance, there had been no unseemly language or ugly behaviour, nothing has been said that was unworthy of the school, and no hard words had passed between members of the teaching staff." - seems familiar