Sorry symptoms trendily diagnosed

It’s no surprise that one of Alain de Botton’s favoured sources, in a text well-sprigged with neat citations, should be Matthew Arnold: sweetness and enlightenment are their common contributions to a culture in which anarchy is the liveliest art form. What can Arnold have been complaining about in Victorian England, as compared with what we applaud in multicultural, populist Tony Blairville? Public loutishness is echoed in the decline of grammar and of civility, the collapse of common reference points, and hence of wit and allusion. Literature is bestsellers and sport is watching Becks bend it.

De Botton is a cut, and occasional thrust, above the usual social diagnostics. David Dimbleby introduces him on Question Time as a ‘philosopher’. You what? He has indeed written on grand topics, Proust and Boethius among them, but never grandly: he epitomises culture and — key term! — accessorises it. If irony is his stock-in-trade, it is administered without malice or condescension: today’s dandy wears his learning, which is wide, as lightly as a cartoonist’s balloon.