The shrill prose is hard to reconcile with the softly spoken middle-aged woman sitting opposite me in the Soho offices of her publishers.
The rest of the guests are mainly quietly spoken, middle-aged Brits dressed much as I imagine Nigel Farage and his Ukip supporters might in a tropical climate.
Yet now, he continues, "quietly spoken middle-class students huddle diligently in libraries," fancying themselves radical as they decode the political subtext of television shows.
Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire" was the story of a highly sexed and poorly spoken middle-aged Polish-American manameded Stanley Kowalski — another vet with a violent streak — who rapes an emotionally fragile and aristocratic woman, Blanche DuBois.
So much so that nicely spoken, middle-class white boy Mick Jagger was able to launch a long and lucrative career as a Tina Turner impersonator, and nobody ever thought of sending the Beatles to elocution lessons.
Nunn supervised a string of hits as resident artistic director at the Haymarket; Flare Path was followed by Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and then came Ralph Fiennes as a beautifully spoken middle-aged and conciliatory Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest as well as Robert Lindsay and Joanna Lumley in James Goldman's The Lion in Winter.
Plenty of Arab friends of mine used to feel the same way and bemoan the fact that they themselves tended to be the western educated, or English speaking middle class elites and apparently a world away from many of their countrymen who were turning towards Islam or anti-Americanism as a kind of salve.
These men were all, broadly speaking, middle-class; if they had been more privileged, they would have slipped without effort into administrative jobs in colonial Burma.
Generally speaking, middle-aged men in Japan tend to prioritize work over health.
Both former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski have spoken about middle of the night phone calls they received in response to purported incoming nuclear strikes.
