Nonetheless, he managed to turn decadence into something of a business proposition.
Decades later, Ralph Ellison remembered him as a bad influence, an unsavory character who "introduced a note of decadence into Afro-American literary matters which was not needed".
And all the initial signs are unpromising: The Glass Room is a book about a culture slipping from decadence into catastrophic decline.
The wives are expressly said to be chaste, and the adoption of their names by whores in a brothel symbolises the perversion and decadence into which the city had fallen before it surrendered to Islam.
In contrasting the prosperity of the nation under his earliest predecessors with the decadence into which it had fallen at the time of his own accession, Telipinus provides a useful though not always reliable summary of early Hittite history: Formerly Labarnas was Great King; and then his sons, his brothers, his connections by marriage, his blood-relations and his soldiers were united.
(Anderson Jake Shimabukuruu (Saturday) The ukulele virtuoso from Hawaii suffuses psychedelic decadence into his stereotypically fey instrument of choice; his slick four-string renditions of rock anthems, from the Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," course along on a deft musicianship that evades mere novelty.
This is no one's idea of refined eating, but there are some innovations on the menu that show a modern hand: a flavorful vegetarian version of cholent, the traditional slow-cooked bean stew; a schnitzel with almonds in the breading; a carrot soufflé pushed into decadence by a dark chocolate sauce.
Overindulgence at its best turns us into "happy idiots" and at its worst, drags us down into decadence, hedonism, and a failure of self-mastery that he scorned as the ugly side of humanity.
The chocolate decadence, a torte with a thick layer of ganache, was irresistible.
But by eliminating the crucial position of narrator, Mr. Schlondorff sacrificed the novel's philosophical dimension, which transforms Proust's account of aristocratic decadence and erotic despair into a highly evolved work of art.
