wonder with dignified resentment why her Jubilee year should be saddled with the grisliest, most inept, inexperienced yet pompous, and thoroughly dislikeable Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minsiter and Leader of the Opposition in their island's history, or that they should preside over the most foolish, unprincipled, careerist and easily-herded crowd of MPs since the passing of the 1832 Reform Act. She might want to look at her nation's cultural health and wonder, too. There may be an almost reassuring continuity in the observation that her left-wing intellectuals are wetting themselves with rapture over a book of thuddingly crap Taliban poetry, just as they used go schoolgirl crushy-crushy for Stalin and Hitler. But what might she have made of this , though? (Follow the link and see if you are able to beat my record of looking at the accompanying photograph for three heroic seconds before vomiting up your small intestines.) And it's possible she will note a certain tapering off in the aspirations and breadth of outlook displayed by our public intellectuals. In the fifties, the radio programme The Brains Trust could hardly find a table big enough for the nation's genuinely popular, genuinely insightful commentators to fit around. Who would be there now? The obvious answer has surely occurred to you while you were still reading the question: buffoonish, foie gras-eating windbag Stephen Fry: for many, a walking definition of erudition and cultural attainment, God help us. Our literature and drama remain mired in an undergraduate fantasy world where