Then, decolonization and the aftermath of two world wars brought an atmosphere of determination that things must never again be as they were. To look back was to invite the fate of Lot's wife. They were the years of the pop music charts no trivial part of life, and the more definitive a feature because generated by the young. Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind argued that music made more difference than television. Perhaps he was right.
Successful oldies format radio now plays that music to a huge audience.
We have created a classical age. A Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire as a low ebb in the evaluation of the work of the Imperial sophists. Directness and authenticity of the kind those post-war days responded to are almost never in evidence in the literature of the Second Sophistic. Anderson in his book challenges the habits of thought which shaped these negative responses. Hence a thematic progression, moving chapter by chapter from training and rhetorical exercises via Attic correctness, sophistic history, philosophy and description to the novel, paradoxography, humour, piety.