The Cigarette Book: The History and Culture of Smoking

(Spectator) I have seen the last of the things that are gone, brooded the poet Padraic Colum. But then so have we all. We have seen them clustered outside the plate-glass doors of offices or under the flapping canvas awnings ouside pubs, these last irreconcilables inhaling in the wind and rain. And the crazy thing is that they are acquiring a tattered dignity, which presumably was the last thing the authorities and the doctors thought would result when they got their ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces.
But what happens when their ranks thin, when eventually just one is left, as the last old Jacobite was left in some Paris café? Continued