EVEN by the sybaritic standards of the motor industry, the reception at Jaguar's Castle Bromwich assembly plant last month was remarkable in its opulence, rather like some debs' ball.
A ferocious local official, he brought even the sybaritic Georgians to follow Party discipline.
Unlike the clamour of West Indian crowds, the passion of Indians and Pakistanis, the commitment of the South Africans and the sybaritic quality of cricket in Australia oysters and white wine in Adelaide, fresh joints in Sydney, and beer everywhere English spectators are expected to keep their feelings to themselves.
That approach, however, is surely too sybaritic for straitlaced, Protestant America: and driving standards in France and southern Europe are anyway hardly to be admired.A better way might be a harsher connection between crime and punishment.
Wal-Mart first made headlines by sacking Julie Roehm, a marketing executive whose sybaritic tastes were at odds with the company's Spartan corporate culture.
The stress on Islamic virtue seems odd for a country whose main industry relies on pandering to the sybaritic excesses of honeymooning couples.
The first was sybaritic, a youth that somehow dragged on until he was middle-aged.
A veteran newsman, Walter Cronkite, blames the rise of gambling on "the collapse of America's work ethic in the sybaritic philosophy that you can get something for nothing".
That makes the stir caused last week by Seattle-based TeraBeam Networks the more remarkable.Eight firms used the conference to emerge from "stealth" mode to present themselves to the 700 or so venture capitalists, dot.com chief executives and other technological elites gathered at one of Scottsdale's sybaritic hotels.
The novel begins at the Oblonskys, where the long-suffering wife Dolly has discovered the infidelity of her genial and sybaritic husband Stiva.
On the other hand, the capacity of Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) to influence young men in the direction of sybaritic amorality, or of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) to engender a freer attitude to sex, has never been assessed adequately.
