http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/artic ... teful.html

Just look at the headline. The bloke's a sperm donor. I don't think that being middle class and privately educated is a genetic thing, so why does it matter?

Looks like he is keeping has wanking hand conditioned with some exercises in that photo. What is this story meant to be? The puny one from the Chuckle Brothers has shaved his face and wants cash for cum? Perhaps he is winning over new clients with his 'fart noise' hand-squeeze routine?

Anyone can go to a private school. It only requires cash. Cash can be obtained by many means, good and bad. How does it make a person's DNA desirable? The royal family all went private but they're still a bunch of inbred chinless wonders. Next to them and this grinning cretin I am a veritable Übermensch but I have no trouble in flinging my seed hither and thither with nary a care.

I am tossing (!) away something with more inherent value than this guy is selling - but he is the wanker.

Middlebrow and proud: Experts say it's time to embrace middle-of-the-road tastes (so you can stop pretending to love opera!)

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/artic ... z1TlXsGFD7

Once upon a time, three bears lived in a house in the woods; a £600,000 detached with stables since I know you're dying to ask.

I don't understand this article at all. Why is it sensible for adults to have the same cultural interests as children? I don't think I know what is meant by 'middlebrow'.

Everyone has felt stupid in front of great art at some point. There are two possible reactions: go away and think about it, learn about it, find people who are inspired by it and discuss it with them; or be lazy and accept that the artwork is "too difficult". The Mail doesn't like laziness when it comes to working, but for non-productive purposes it's "sensible" not to make any kind of mental effort at all.

I haven't read the Da Vinci code, but I'm sure it wouldn't be anyone's favourite book if they tried more than two or three novels a year. Of course, people are busy, but if you have friends that discuss reading, they're not going to find your contribution all that stimulating unless you're very articulate in your defence of Dan Brown. It's quite okay not to read novels if you don't want to; but in that case please don't bore everyone senseless with your critique of literature.

Oxford-educated Miranda sounds like an awful bore (if she's not made up). I'd rather discuss the weather than listen to someone going on about a film she hasn't seen.

Dan Brown is a must-read, though. It's so bad it's good, so to speak, and for ever after you use it as a touchstone - 'well, at least it's not as bad as Dan Brown'. I have to say it's one of the few books I've ever come across that combines a page-turner of a plot (ok, straining credibility just a trifle but a page-turner nonetheless) with positively the worst, clunkiest, most painful-to-read prose I've ever seen. Usually books that are that bad are pretty appallingly plotted as well. That said, my husband was enthusiastically encouraged by a friend of his to read further into the Brown oeuvre and ran away screaming after about ten pages of one of his earlier works. I didn't even try.

I burned my copy, in case it fell into the hands of a child or vulnerable adult. I wouldn't let it be recycled in case someone accidentally read some of it.

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Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening; small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening.

Well, obviously it has to be read as a sustained joke.
Which it is.

The plot, possibly. The style, however, is an unspeakable abomination.

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Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening; small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening.

I never saw what was wrong with just being honest about what you like in the first place. I have no issue with liking quite a few low-brow things (no, not in an "ironic" way, I genuinely enjoy KFC or The X Factor or whatnot). However, I also don't get why the columnist thinks that no-one could possibly genuinely enjoy more highbrow stuff either. Liking foreign/independent films, theatre, etc, doesn't mean I'm basically a pretentious snob who lies about how familiar I am with certain directors lest I look stupid; if I don't know what someone's going on about, I'll generally ask.
Basically, the article seems to assume that, because DM columnists are blustering bullshitters, everyone else must be as well.

I went to a private school for a few years, and there was a girl in my year who had a lot of relatives (including one or two former pupils) who were in Thai prisons for drug-smuggling. Rumour had it that they weren't the only members of her family involved in smuggling and it was what paid her school fees. I doubt the schools care how the money is made, as long as it pays the fees.

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"Stop making up quotes and attributing them to me" - Voltaire

Well, that's it in a nutshell, of course. What we're seeing here is the 50s curtain-twitching what-will-the-neighbours-think lack of intellectual confidence that makes some people terrified to be honest about what they like, because they feel they've got to pretend the whole time to be more intellectual than they actually are so as to be respected. It must be a terrible strain keeping it up.

Plus you mustn't appear to be too intellectual. Ooh, it's a knife edge.

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MY COMMENTS ARE FROM THE HORSES MOUTH AND ARE ALL FACTS

Britain - where 'clever' is an insult.

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Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening; small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening.

Ah, that might explain my confusion. My mother is the opposite: she reads quite a lot, but is resolutely uninterested in talking about what she's read. It was either a good story or a bad story, and that's all you'll get. If I ask how she felt about the characters, she'll say "They're not real"; the language and style of the writing are just "how it came out". I feel she has to pretend to be less intelligent than she is, because she's afraid that, as a reader, she isn't 'literary' enough.