The inevitable course, the natural history, of enthusiasm, that burns hotly, brightly... and then, exhausting itself, gutters out?" No matter.
Has the flame of English rebellion guttered out? "In all societies," wrote George Orwell in 1940, "the common people must live to some extent against the existing order".
The lives of certain authors resemble their work in the way dogs are said to resemble their masters: Ernest Hemingway's valourisation of a stoic masculinity that abruptly guttered out when confronted with its own inadequacy; the jolly, indefatigable showmanship of Charles Dickens concealing the long-guarded secret of his relationship with Ellen Ternan.
Dee, a gerontologist, became so consumed with worry about her teenage son "lying dead in a gutter when out late" that she started taking a low dose of Prozac to help her to calm down.
Sartre once woke up in the gutter after passing out on the street alongside his mistress.
Many of today's punks grew up in the halcyon nineties, when the flame of the culture had guttered out.
Even as the once-buoyant love story gutters out with impressively subtle work from Elba and Harris, the film does not shrink from linking scenes of raw internecine violence in the freedom movement with Winnie Mandela's denunciation of "traitors" to the cause.
Although the much-discussed post-7/7 flood of tube-shy gutter wobblers turned out to be a temporary spike (an extra 15 per cent, or 4,000 journeys, that lasted two weeks), numbers have doubled in London over the past five years.
Farah went on to thunder in his April 18 column that Cooper's use of the word was "grossly degrading," and he "should have his dirty, little gutter mouth washed out with soap" and then be fired.
