Tins of Shit: How to Flog Dog Food

Dog owners are subs, inadequates, underachieving bullies. You’ve seen the stunted, bloated, pallid army of the potato fed, the army whose weapons are ambulatory ones. It is not by chance that such publications as Our dogs, Dogs Monthly and Dog World are to be found on newsagents’ shelves immediately beside Gung Ho and Guns and Ammo: corner shop Patels know all too well in lieu of what these pavement tyrants have dogs – though were handguns licensed they’d of course deploy them as well as their dogs. Meanwhile for rottweiler read Colt, for alsatian Smith and Wesson, for great dane Walther, for dobermann some particularly lethal cross bow already available under plain wrapper.

Bloke, Bloker, Blokest

Carving a Career in Style: Robert Elms

There is, of course, nothing more conventional than youthful non-conformism. Rebecca West noted this of Zelda Fitzgerald more than half a century ago. Youth culture has become institutionalized, and, however much the protagonists of one wave may abhor their immediate predecessors, they're all pretty much the same if you're on the outside: sartorial waywardness; impatience with the 'straight' world of parents, businessmen, authority; untutored hedonism on a budget. These movements, though they may promiscuously pretend to the idea of community, are rigorously hierarchical. There is always an élite whose mores, clothes, catch-phrases are the models for an army of acolytes. There is always a laureate, an instant 'historian'-cum-proselytizer, the one with the words and a talent for promoting himself as the embodiment of an ideal.

This Year in Marienbad