Until we get rid of this division by class,Oxbridge graduates will always think they are superior to other graduates. (Which is a fallacy of course!)However, it’s obvious that the class system is here to stay so long as we have a monarchy and extremely wealthy people and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

The Ahmadinejad you refer to is a nasty extremist, but his stupid and violent rhetoric is matched by nasty extremists like Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, who has talked of drowning Palestinians in the Red Sea. Neither should be seen as sole arbiters of the policies of their respective countries, thank goodness.

Israel operates a policy of occupying the land of the Palestinians in defiance of the unanimous resolution of the UN security council (resolution 242), where it operates a de facto apartheid policy, and it is the country in the region with nuclear weapons -not Iran.

Gunther Grass’ past is deeply problematic -especially the silence that he enveloped his past. But saying he is an anti Semite is too quick. Give me some evidence.

By the way, are YOU objective about Israel -or Iran?

I have to correct you, Iran has definatly threatened Israel and more! Achmadinijad has clearly said (and in this words) “Israel must be wiped of the map” and he supports by financing, and militiraizing the Hizbulla, the Islamic Jihad and more organization that keeps attacking Israel in a daily basis. So Israel is demending that the US will stop the nuclear production, but Uran is trying to eliminate Israel for the past years!

Dont twist the reallity and learn the facts. Gunter was an SS officer, and a known antisemit. He cant be objective about Israel.

I found this statue which I hadn’t seen before (it wasn’t there when I was a student at nearby University College in the 1950s) and decided to include a picture of Gandhi contemplating the joys of spring. Of course my picture is taken from a different angle with Gandhi looking down at the flowers – now with the tulips out and the human figures quietly relaxing in the background.

What I liked with your picture is that the tiny human figure in the background is sitting on a seat learning forward at the same angle as Gandhi – was it deliberate planning – or just serendipidy?

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2. Works of art that expand your way of seeing do this, as art, thru what AND how they say it -I’d argue that much that passes for ‘horizon-expanding’ is no such thing if it just repeats ways of saying that indicate that the artist isn’t really looking at the world freshly & honestly.

3.The complaint about novels that pretend to be about something needs some clarification on my part. In one sense they all too clearly ARE about something. What I mean is that they fail to match their ‘subject’ in a way that would make it live, that would do more than have it as ‘the subject’. Imagine a writer who takes on a weighty theme but actually fails to really engage with it because her way of seeing is hobbled by cliche or failure to really explore the topic for herself. The work of art ends up as a charade. It has failed to meet the demands of the real, which is to get actually approach the thing one is writing ‘about’ in all its strangeness and singularity. Middlebrow fails this test (a moral and aesthetic failure, often).

4. I, too, wish more people would read. But -so what? Does this mean that the mediocre should get a round of applause?

2. The middlebrow is criticized for not emphasizing formal innovation. This is said to foster complacency. But the emphasis on formal innovation can be (although obviously, it doesn’t have to be) a cover for another kind of narrowness, where artists, critics, and scholars get excited over the way conventions are questioned, claiming that this in itself has radical significance, even though it doesn’t necessarily lead to any more profound or interesting insight into the world we live in. But many scholars, in my view, overstate the value of formal matters in art because it provides them with work—analyzing form is what they’re good at and what they’re paid to do.

3. A fairly conventional work of art that helps me imaginatively understand a piece of the world I’m not familiar with—say a period or a place or a subculture or a personality type—arguably expands my understanding and disturbs my complacency more than a work that questions conventions within my own comfort zone.

4. The critic of the middlebrow is too quick, IMHO, to project feelings, attitudes and intentions to the middlebrow: e.g. “smugness”, “pretending to be about something” and so on. These claims need support. And why say that the middlebrow only “pretends” to be about something? I don’t particularly like Amis’ “Money” but it seems to me it clearly is about, among other things, the crassness of mind and feeling characteristic of a money-dominated culture. I don’t see any pretentiousness there.

5. I may agree that the work of McEwan and co, say, is often overrated by critics. But this doesn’t upset me much. What percentage of the population read these books? A very small percentage. If I come across a student of mine reading a book by Barnes or Kingsolver, I’m delighted. “Reader,” I say, “let me grasp your hand!” The problem in our culture isn’t that too many people are reading middlebrow fiction instead of difficult stuff; it’s that too many people don’t read at all, and fill their waking consciousness with computer games, daytime TV, right wing tabloids and radio, etc. I say let’s pick carefully the things to get upset about and to look down upon. Readers of middlebrow fiction may not be about to storm the bastille. But they are people who enjoy literature’ and I suspect that I share their values to a considerable extent. But then I would, wouldn’t I?