I had to read through both Baudelaire's Fleur de mal and Victor Hugo's Les Châtiments before finding this perfect quote. I wanted to find something that balanced with the Goethe quote from page 8 (easy to find now with my new index). Baudelaire would have been good but I didn't find anything useful. Then I found the Victor Hugo poems, but they were no good as Hugo was in exile on Gurnsey and wrote spitefully about the coup of Napoleon III, so that would spill to perfect into the brexit views and against the painful europhilia of Boris. So in the end I came to Rimbaud. I had had the idea that he was a bit too punk (1870-punk that is) but when I found this bit I could suddenly see that it fitted Boris perfect. Boris Johnson was a young man when the yuppies influenced right wing fashion, and they were exactly nihilist money minding punks. So Boris perfectly fits the profile, and I guess Rimbaud is one of his favourite poets.
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