Vocabulary Shout-Out: John le Carré for "Sybarite"

In his recent thriller Our Kind of Traitor, John le Carré slips the A+ word sybarite into a description of the many sides of ingénue spy and literature professor Perry Makepiece. 

There was Perry the self-punishing student at London University…who in the mould of T. E. Lawrence had taken his bicycle to France in the vacations and ridden it until he keeled over with exhaustion.…And yes, there was Perry the alpine adventurer, the Perry who could run no race and play no game, from seven-a-side rugby to pass the parcel…without a compulsive need to win.…But there was also Perry the closet sybarite who treated himself to unpredictable bursts of luxury before hurrying back to his garret.

Sybarite is an old world that originally referred to the residents of the ancient Italian city of Sybaris, located just between the arch and the toe of the Italian boot. For close to three hundred years ending just after 500 BC, the Sybarites got rich off their busy port and fertile farming land and used their wealth to develop and indulge a taste for luxury.

They became so famous for it, in fact, that the ancient Greeks used the word sybarite to mean anyone "addicted to luxury." These  two+ millennia later, le Carré's sybarite means just the same thing.