“In his personal and private shorthand Peter Davis had tagged Patricia Leggatt, and the tag was upper arty. It had amused him to imagine her background, for the Minister’s modest flat where he had met her clearly wasn’t her natural stamping ground. That would be somewhere in the Cadogans, he had decided, somewhere rich and talkative. The people lived by taking each other’s photographs. Not really, of course: they all had private incomes which it was very bad form to mention; they all assumed that you had too. And they talked–how they talked! They talked novels and pictures and plays, and operas you’d never heard of. Not that they knew much about them, for solid knowledge meant work–hard reading and even thought. But they knew what was new.
“What was new was worth chattering about.”
William Haggard, The Unquiet Sleep
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
