If you want to be somebody nowadays, you'd better start by getting in touch with your inner nobody, because nobody likes a somebody who can't prove they've been nobody all along. Today's celebrities hack their cloth to suit the fashion of the times: the less you do the more you are doing, the less you know the more you are knowing, the less you wear the more you are wearing, and so say all of us. God loves a chancer more than he loves a trier, and the tabloid newspapers - who recognise no higher power than themselves - speak every day for a Britain that is perfectly in love with its cellphone democracy. This is William Cobbett's country no more, so let us sling a troubled thought among the Christmas books.

LRB 2 January 2003 | PDF Download