The stage was the Today programme which, this week, is being guest-edited by various notables.
That has only recently been addressed because notables, egged on by Operation Black Vote and Lenny Henry's demands for more diversity, made a public fuss.
This tension between cowardly self-interest and resistance is the bass motif above which Maupassant composes a sour fugue of hypocrisy and cruelty, as a group of Rouennais notables exploit then shun the prostitute of the title, whose hospitality they had previously enjoyed.
Scott Lemieux is a professor of political science at the College of Saint Rose, Albany, New York, and blogs for Lawyers, Guns and Money An hour before the start, the courtroom was filled with a buzz of excitement, and a who's who gallery of legal and political notables.
The pub's 16 cask beers are more traditional, but you will find some notables in there from local breweries, such as Moonshine and Colchester Brewery, as well as new-wave guest beers from, for instance, Manchester's TicketyBrew and Yorkshire's Summer Wine.
So did notables in the long-established liberal Wafd party and the rump of Mr Mubarak's disgraced but still surviving National Democratic Party.
Before the election, he appointed a committee of notables who are a mixture of new savvy and safe old guard.
A host of tycoons, Bollywood stars and other notables showed up too.
He said for the record that in 2004, when he informed Mrs Zia, then the prime minister, that ten lorries full of arms had landed up in Chittagong, she showed no response.Other notables sentenced to die include a former chief of military intelligence, the former second-in-command of the DGFI and a former head of the Criminal Investigation Department.
The notables were Manchu princes of the blood, arch-conservatives concerned as much about their own skins as about the fate of the nation.
He recruited extensively from what is known as "administrative parties"—electoral machines dating to the time of the monarch's late father, Hassan II, and composed mostly of provincial notables.
