And yet there's something gloomily philistine about it, something that leaves you with a surprising pang for the days when Tory patricians were allowed to be decent chaps without quite such demands on their electoral palatability.
We toasted our good fortune and berated philistine rail modernisers as we gently rocked our way out of London.
The reactionary rants and philistine jibes are undimmed.
But he manages to confound those who dismiss him as a free-market philistine.
The author turns this to her advantage, allowing the book to meander eruditely, rather like an 18th-century conversation.Drunkenness and friendship gave the Kit-Cats a feeling of invincibility; so much so that they even tried to introduce the philistine English to opera.
He dislikes L.S. Lowry's "Elysian fabrication of the North" and he disapproves of Euan Uglow's "icy objectivity" towards his models.Mostly Mr Cork keeps his critical ire for philistine readers, though the complaints diminish as the edgy art of the 1970s and early 1980s later becomes mainstream.
So far, however philistine and ruthless their motivations seem to the industry's old guard, private-equity firms are making media work better.
Part of a big splurge on the arts on Tyneside, which was instigated by a self-described "philistine" local Labour councillor, the gallery is also a symbol of Britain's bygone days of plenty.
