Enjoyable writing but you seem to see the BBC drama department as an indicator of contemporary writing, of art, but it hasn't fulfilled that role for forty years. And aren't we now starting to live through Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel, Bonfire of the Vanities?

This article has stuck in my mind. It seems to be a projection of the author's failure to predict the riots in England. As they were happening. I feel it is unfair in both its demands on and evaluation of the arts. Dickens was writing about events a generation previously. That is hardly prescience The transgressions of comfortable elites are at the core of later Ballard. And it is a mistake to assume that the forms of artistic critique (or prediction, which really is not the job of the arts) in the early twenty first century must resemble those of the nineteenth. A cosy art of familiar moralising would not be a realistic bow wave for or response to the crash. Which leads us back to Hirst's skull...

didnt have a chance to see little dorrit will see today

"The Modernist movement, whose emergence Hobsbawm described, inculcated the notion that politics, foreign policy, war, business, money and work were not fit subjects for respectable artists." Are you being serious? The movement which produced Ezra Pound, whose 'Guide to Kultur" rambles on about usury? The movement which included Wyndham Lewis and Robert Graves who both wrote splendid autobiographies about their war experiences? The movement which produced Picasso, whose 'Guernica' is a timeless polemic against war? Modernism runs through Steinbeck, who definitely wrote about class, work, and money. "Writers imagined every kind of powerful person presiding over every kind of disaster, except powerful bankers presiding over a financial disaster or the leaders of the European Union presiding over an economic one." Martin Amis, 'Success', 'Money'; Alan Hollinghurst, "The Line Of Beauty", Christopher Brookmyre, "Quite Ugly One Morning", Jonathon Coe, "What a Carve Up!" Of course, these are mostly about Thatcher's years, and with the exception of Amis were written some time after the period they described. That's because writers need time to digest and mulch events before turning them into fiction. However, there are contemporary writers who are popular and have been adapted for other media who write about these very things. There's really not much point in writing a novel about the collapse of the European Union: it would be science fiction if written now, and likely to look quaint at best by the time it reached the first reviewers. Lastly, at the cinema on Tuesday, I saw trailers for Tower Heist and Time http://bit.ly/ubtfJJ and http://bit.ly/sUYtuH That's two films out next week which are about the rich squashing the poor. And films take a long time from script idea to release. The zeitgeist looks pretty healthy to me.

Artists said nothing, because they are inherently left wing, and a Labour govt was in charge.

+1 for dirigible :-)

"It is unlikely that any historian will look to the arts of the first decade of the 21st century to find warnings of the economic collapse of the West." For The Love Of God...