“Heavy apparatus has been at work in the last hundred years to enervate and stultify the imaginative faculties. First, realistic novels and plays, then the cinema have made the urban mentality increasingly subject to suggestion. It lapses effortlessly into a trance-like escape from its condition. Great popularity in fiction and film is only attained by works in which reader and audience can transpose themselves and be vicariously endangered, loved and applauded.”
Evelyn Waugh, “St. Helena Empress” (1951)