Christmas special

Early on in his classic Notes on a Cellar Book, the literary scholar George Saintsbury writes that “no reasonable person should quarrel if we begin with Sherry, even as the truly good and wise usually do at dinner.” That was in 1920. Can you imagine anyone writing that today? The answer is no. But that only tells us how fickle are the revolving fashions of taste. For us, Sherry is an antique taste, quaint if not fusty. By and large it’s something that maiden aunts drink between knitting projects and jumble sales. At its best, Sherry has a fading academic aroma. When I was in graduate school, I had a semester-long tutorial on Plato with the eminent Platonist Robert Brumbaugh.

While Republicans make a symbolic point of permitting smoking in the Capitol complex whenever they’re in power, no one’s lungs really seem to have been in it since John Boehner held the speakership. Back rooms in Washington aren’t what they used to be. So it’s nice that the oddly named Morton’s The Steakhouse — which as a Chicago-based chain is now really Morton’s The 65 Domestic and International Steakhouses — is one place where Washington’s journalists and politicians can still enjoy the complex aromas of cigars, steak and corruption. One person whom it’s almost unavoidable to see at Morton’s is the recently deposed chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, SenatorBob Menendez.