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If, like so many of us, you have been scouting about for a scrap of good news, preferably without electrodes, hoods or leering GI babes pointing at male genitals, I can offer you this small but heart-warming quotation: "It is smart to be intelligent these days." According to Catherine Fairweather of Harpers & Queen, her magazine would not, five years ago, have dreamt of covering, for example, the literary festival at Hay-on- Wye. Now, presumably if the Tatler or Country Life are not there first, they do.
The first reaction of many people to this news from someone on the cutting edge of all that is cool and fashionable, will not be one of relief but of panic. They will fret as to whether they are quite smart enough to be one of the smart set. Perhaps the new, glossy-reading intelligentsia has been quietly spending the past five years swotting up on Universal String Theory, checking out the essays of Susan Sontag, reading five-page analyses of the effects of globalisation in the New York Review of Books, and are now out there, chatting, partying, swapping ideas and generally leaving the rest of us floundering among the unfashionable thickos. Maybe life was easier in many ways, less frightening and demanding, when stupidity was all the rage.
The context of Catherine Fairweather's remarks will...