"I'm pleased that our high-ranking officials have good musical taste," wrote one fan.
And, the odd carp aside – "a weary exhibition of bad taste", wrote Graham Greene in the Spectator – he brought it off.
"Everything proposed by the Uniform Bulk Program is entirely a matter of taste," wrote Herbert Muschamp, the architecture critic for The New York Times.
"A private railroad car is not an acquired taste," wrote Mr. Belmont's wife, who apparently had a great sense of humor.
Later, following still more unleashings of violence and distress, the Daily Telegraph's arbiter of taste wrote that Bacon had now gone beyond the realms of despair and entered the arena of all that is "vicious" and "evil".
"The Koran's good verses are like the food an assassin adds to poison to disguise a deadly taste," writes Don Richardson, a well-known missionary who worked in Muslim countries, in "Secrets of the Koran" (Regal Books, 2003).
Kenneth Clark, who admired his artistic taste, wrote Hugh Walpole was one of the three or four real patrons of modern art in this country; and of that small body he was perhaps the most generous and the most discriminating.
At the other end of the sophistication spectrum, two American chefs who chant the mantra of simplicity have new books out: Marco Canora (Salt to Taste, written with Catherine Young, Rodale, $35) and Karen DeMasco (The Craft of Baking, written with Mindy Fox, Clarkson Potter, $35).
"In third world countries, where refrigeration and sanitary concerns are often quite iffy, spoiled meat is seldom discarded, but rather cooked to the extreme and mixed with spices, garlic, peppers, etc. to hide a rotten taste," wrote Lewis Regenstein, who described himself as a world traveler.
