decadence

National renewal: The country must be reinvigorated from its decadence by a kind of shock therapy; this trait is a function of an exaggerated nostalgia and a hatred of the present.

For writers in the 1960s, middle-class infidelity offered a keyhole to deeper social themes—“the relation of individual to collective decadence,” the critic Wilfrid Sheed wrote of Updike’s fiction.

Now he faces the merely gargantuan task of propelling his country out of “100 years of decadence,” to quote his own phrase.

Perhaps as a rebellion against her partner’s darkness and decadence, Birkin developed a personal style that exuded lightness, naturalness and relatable elegance.

Cooper is very much alive and enjoying a modest and well-deserved decadence.