If the overreacting author is unknown (and a bit insane), all the resulting publicity will be bad, as it will probably be if an author tracks down and stalks someone who gives them a going-over on Goodreads. In the latter case, though, the author may be seen as bravely standing up to ‘the Goodreads bullies’. The democracy of the internet. Authors hate that, in inverse proportion to their success and/or talent.

A hundred years ago, the 'middlebrow' question was inextricably mixed up with class: Virginia Woolf came from the lower-upper class (or the upper-upper-middle) and grew up just before the great cataclysms that destroyed the rentier class. Her visceral hatred for the ‘betwixt and between’ petit bourgeois ‘middlebrow’ made sense. If you think it no longer exists, it is there as plain as day, slightly altered, in the ‘Things Bogans Like’ phenomenon – stepped down a stratum or two, to demonise working-class people who have acquired wealth and yet have the temerity not to try and emulate the urban bourgeoisie.

It is not just a matter of 'white over black' as Fulton tends to stress. The judges and winners are solidly Anglo-Celtic with a few minor variations. It is also notable that they are nearly all creatures of the academic world at some level as are poets of the award-eligible class in Australia generally.