(Ms. Paglia deemed the piece, by the Nigerian-British artist Chris Ofili, a Turner Prize winner, to be "a very second-rate, third-rate, no, fourth-rate work").
She talks about teaching, faith, the "new atheists" ("I think that this avalanche of literature that we have gotten recently is very second-rate. It simply is not well formed. I consider it to be noise"), and her own guiding principles: My loyalty is to human loveliness and the deep experience of self that every self deserves.
There is something very tenth-rate about the illiberal, restrictive, humourless, narrow-minded, meddling, coercive, uneducated and punitive Home Office ever since David Blunkett, begetter of this rot, made it such a blight on the fabric of Britain.
There is a man who left this country with the character of a first rate naturalist (though with many eccentricities) and of a very first-rate Natural History artist and he goes to Australia and takes up the subject of Botany, of which he is as ignorant as a goose".
"The very first heart rate measurement was - as you would imagine fairly high," recalled Dr Williams.
One wrote that the royals were "a very ordinary rather second rate family," but that the Queen "had real distinction".
But BBC chairman Gavyn Davies has betrayed the corporation's true feelings towards the competition - for which it paid £200m - by saying he thought it had "become very much a second rate competition".
Very good; first rate, in fact.
In Cadiz, despite Spanish hesitation, the messages from Linois coupled with strong representations from le Pelley prompted Mazzaredo to order a squadron to sea on the morning of 9 July, commanded by Vice-Admiral Don Juan Joaquin de Moreno and including two very large first rate ships of the line: Real Carlos and San Hermenegildo, each mustering 112 guns.
Somerset Maugham called his own output "the very top rank of the second rate", and I think the same could probably be said for Du Maurier". "I hate the word 'middle brow'.
To borrow from (the also rapidly disappearing) Somerset Maugham: Nevil Shute, JB Priestley, Nicholas Monsarrat and AJ Cronin were all once at the "very top rank of the second rate", but it's safe to wager that few people have read anything by any of them recently.
