Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

The early socialist writers and thinkers, great men, William Morris, Shaw, all these people at the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century, they had an idea that socialism would, as it were, give a great impetus to civilisation, high civilisation and spread it out among the general population. It has worked the other way. You don't have to go to England to know that the level of English entertainment, the current of thought, public thought is at an extremely low level. And people want it like that. They want it to be for the people. They want it to be plebian. They want it very low. That's terrible. And that weighs on me. Because without a high civilisation, I think, countries eventually rot away.

V.S. Naipaul, interviewed a short while ago on India's NDTV.