Ed West on his substack Wrong Side of History

"The hilariously hateful Wyndham Lewis warned that the 20th century was a time of cultural decay because it was more feminine and in ‘an increasingly feminine world… the natural feminine hostility to the intellect’ was running amok. ‘The blind, purposeless will of women forced them to go shopping en masse,’ he noted. ‘It causes, daily, millions of women to drift in front of, and swarm inside, gigantic clothes shops in every great capital, buying silk underclothing, cloche-hats, perfumes, vanishing creams, vanity bags and furs’. Sounds like someone was forced to go on a shopping trip."

"Contempt for the proletariat was matched by contempt for the middle class and the suburbs they inhabited. Cyril Connolly in The Unquiet Grace wrote that ‘slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but the middle-class suburbs are the incubators of apathy and delirium’.

"Poet Brian Howard was heard during the war discussing military secrets loudly in a pub and was approached by a policeman, to whom he replied. ‘I am Brian Howard and I live in Mayfair. No doubt you come from some dreary suburb’. Ezra Pound, discussing his earlier anti-Semitism, blamed his ‘stupid, suburban prejudice’.

"Animating this prejudice was a feeling that only artists truly felt emotions, or as Lawrence put it, ‘Life is more vivid in me, than in the Mexican who drives the wagon for me’. G K. Chesterton has his character Lucien Gregory in The Man Who Was Thursday say that ‘The man who throws a bomb is an artist. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen.’"