In Defense of Sesquipedalians

In this (very short) podcast, author Will Self sets out his point of view that falling standards and expectations in arts and humanities education, together with our increasing desire to gain knowledge without intellectual rigour or effort are leading to the slow death of western culture. He feels we should embrace the intellectual challenge of 'difficult' books and art, and value works which are more taxing than our increasingly low-brow popular culture. On the way, he also has a few choice words to say about the work of Damien Hirst.

Incidentally, I was interested to see that the word 'sesquipedalian', as used by Self, is not recognised by the spell-checker either in Blogger or Microsoft Word.