middlebrows

In the 50th anniversary commentary this week of Harper Lee's masterpiece, "To Kill A Mockingbird," a book long derided as middlebrow by middlebrows, no one fully noted the centrality, the cosmic force, that propelled the book, and that is the idea of the father.

Youth Has Outlived Its Usefulness 2010

Economist is for poseurs and middlebrows. the kind that think NPR is smart.

The Volokh Conspiracy » “Buried Deep Within Thomas Jefferson’s Correspondence and Papers, 2009

Such are the thoughts of one who will stay in Bloomsbury until the Duke of Bedford, rightly concerned for the respectability of his squares, raises the rent so high that Bloomsbury is safe for middlebrows to live in.

The Death of the Moth, and other essays 2002

And again, I press on, brandishing a muffin on the point of a tea spoon, how dare the middlebrows teach you how to read — Shakespeare for instance?

The Death of the Moth, and other essays 2002

It is very kind of the middlebrows to try to teach them culture.

The Death of the Moth, and other essays 2002

When the middlebrows, on the contrary, have earned enough to live on, they go on earning enough to buy — what are the things that middlebrows always buy?

The Death of the Moth, and other essays 2002

They are the go – betweens; they are the busy – bodies who run from one to the other with their tittle tattle and make all the mischief — the middlebrows, I repeat.

The Death of the Moth, and other essays 2002

Now there are highbrows — I myself have known duchesses who were highbrows, also charwomen, and they have both told me with that vigour of language which so often unites the aristocracy with the working classes, that they would rather sit in the coal cellar, together, than in the drawing – room with middlebrows and pour out tea.

The Death of the Moth, and other essays 2002

Talk to them, as you talk to me, and you will know more about Shakespeare than all the middlebrows in the world can teach you — I do not think, by the way, from certain phrases that Shakespeare liked middlebrows, or Pope either.

The Death of the Moth, and other essays 2002

These middlebrows pat balls about; they poke their bats and muff their catches at cricket.

The Death of the Moth, and other essays 2002