The Killer Inside Me is a particular distillation of male hate, as practised by repulsive and inadequate individuals who have been encouraged to see themselves as essentially decent by virtue of the trappings of authority in which they have wrapped themselves.
"Players, and people who surround the players, make decent money by virtue of being in the Premier League," he said.
But Englander runs the risk of making the whole feel a little too slivered: most readers like to settle with characters, and would, in any case, surely claim decent attention spans by happy virtue of their reading at all.
Like decent men, progressive Christians, by virtue of their identification with the offending group, owe it to all of us, but especially the victims, to own the abuse caused by your people, work diligently to call out the problems and rectify them wherever possible, not distance yourself from them.
Compared to Keane, he'd been no sort of player, and decent managers control decent players by virtue of being decent men; what had he left?
Any decent human life, he believes, requires certain virtues, and depends on a respect and love of individuals for the people around them.
The scholar Robert Fink, in a 2005 essay, convincingly argues that the opera "attempts to counterpoise to terror's deadly glamour the life-affirming virtues of the ordinary, of the decent man, of small things".
The virtues are necessarily simple – generous glazing, decent ceiling heights in the classrooms, good proportions, plain detailing – and efforts are made to make the most of not very much.
Fink, in 2005, responded that, in the end, the work celebrates precisely those middle-class values that Taruskin believes it rejects: the "life-affirming virtues of the ordinary, of the decent man, of small things".
For now, though, they're still here, and the H30 seems to combine the virtues of low price, compact body, and decent functionality.
