Entertaining Great Books Allusion of the Day

Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, describing the misery of life in a state of primal anarchy: "In such condition...the life of man [is] solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

Theodore Dalrymple, in an essay on how widespread malnutrition is among the welfare poor of Britain in the aftermath of the disintegration of the nuclear family, family dinners and therefore the very art of cooking itself having disappeared entirely from the welfare subculture:

Moreover, unlike the people who spoke so fluently of the food deserts, I had, in the course of my medical duties, visited many homes in the area.... [In homes other than those of recently-immigrated Indian families], cookery meant (at its best) re-heating in a microwave oven, and there was no table round which people could sit together to eat the re-heated food. Meals here were solitary, poor, nasty, British, and short. [From "The Starving Criminal," in Our Culture, What's Left of It]