Your first flights will be in a dual-control glider with an instructor. Although the club is not in London at all, but in the south Midlands, it is easy to reach from anywhere in southern and central England, and offers daily, weekend or longer courses for those wanting to learn this most freeing of sports. It is hard, once you have seen it animated with such affection, ever to feel especially revolted by the stuff again.. Towed up by a plane and set adrift in the endless expanses of the sky – gliding is like flying a light aircraft without the noise and bother of an engine

The London Gliding Club was set up in the 1930s. “Deep brown, burnished shit is extruded in a steady, paste-like stream in front of you: uniform, sweet-smelling fruit of the body, fertile medium, not negative substance,” Gillian Rose wrote of her colostomy bag a couple of years ago in Love’s Work.

This does not read like a lucid excursion into liberal theory. It reads like an intellectually souped-up version of a Jerry Seinfeld routine.And Miller makes comparatively little of our two most efficacious disgust- busters: science and love. It doesn’t really have a solid line of argument running through it, and some of the smaller points it does contain do not entirely make sense. For example, Miller concludes that disgust, among other things, is the fundamental sticky stuff of democracy. Rather a lot of his explorations in this area have to do with the “downward contempt” he feels for the tattooed, cleft-bottomed builder he has had in to do his home improvements, and the “upward contempt” he assumes his this builder feels for him. “Like so much else in the realm of the disgusting, [hypocrisy] confuses boundaries so there is no firm point we can trust, and it reminds us that the best things come with sickening side-effects.” Just as life comes to us trailing behind it all the stinky, contagious by-products of its inseparable companion, death.The Anatomy of Disgust is basically an enjoyable, methodologically eclectic academic romp. The forces of putrefaction, sadly, always triumph in the end.In his day-job, Miller teaches law at the University of Michigan.

In the evenings, his passion is Old Norse sagas, whose pagan codes of honour were central to his last book, Humiliation (1993). The key chapters of this book accordingly analyse human social behaviour in terms of the same ineffably depressing “life-soup” as we find in nature, swamping us on all sides. Hangmen, lawyers and politicians, for example, he has down as “moral menials”, “bottom-feeders” whose role in the social ecosystem is to soak up “moral dirt”. And the reason everybody hates a hypocrite isn’t just because he swindles us as he “slithers” and “flatters” and “fawns”.”Hypocrites,” you see, “impose vices on us: distrustfulness, cynicism and paranoia. They make all virtue suspect; they are parasites on the moral order and sap the strength of the organism they feed on.” A clever hypocrite can easily take a good person to the cleaner’s, which suggests that, often, the virtuous are stupid and weak. But he does note that “a teaspoon of sewage will spoil a barrel of wine, but a teaspoon of wine will do nothing for a barrel of sewage” The natural world does not work like Batman and Robin. Miller, strangely, makes little use in his book of what Kristeva came to call “the abject”.