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.

Indyk seems to think that the marketplace is a swelling crowd of populist barbarians – possibly an image that would be appreciated by Pratchett – but not (to his mind) comprised of the ‘true’ readers of literature. Quality and appeal are not mutually exclusive. In attempting to distinguish the ‘marketplace’ from cultural appreciation, Indyk wrests from the readers of books the power to be considered and conscious of what they read. He seems to think that the people who read Pratchett are different from the people who read Marquez, but he has no evidence of this.