And here is Charles Highway being unadvisedly candid with Derek, a student at the same Oxbridge crammer, on the sensitive subject of facial hygiene, and unable to resist stepping over the line of self-preservation:

"Yes. Why don't you give washing a whirl one of these days? It can't be much fun walking around with all that crap, all the greaze, all over your face. But — got to keep the spots fed, I suppose. Tell me, Mr Sebum, tell me, Monsieur Têtes-noires, how does it go down with the girls? I bet they..."

Here is Keith on the eradication of chastity from the modern world:

What'll they write about, he wondered, when all women fall? Well, there'll be new ways of falling...

And here are the more repletely euphuistic, yet parallel, thoughts of Terence in Success as he riffles through the top shelf at his local newsagent, and ponders the ruinous rate of consumption implicit in industrialised pornography:

I flicked through six or seven magazines, all of which were evidently still in the business of showing men what the insides of women's vaginas and anuses look like. There are hundreds of these girls in every magazine, and there are hundreds of these magazines in every shop, and there are hundreds and hundreds of shops. Where do these girls come from and how do they get hold of them and make them show us what the insides of their vaginas and anuses look like? They must have asked every girl in the world to do it by now. Have they asked Jan yet, or Ursula, or Phyllis at Dino's? Pretty soon they'll run out of girls who will do it. Then they'll have to find ways of making the girls who won't do it do it. Then we'll know what the insides of every girl's vagina and anus look like. That'll be good too.