Postmortem …

… An archipelago of parvenus | A. N. Wilson on Downton Abbey. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Downton, then, is for audiences happy that the old aristocratic world is dead, just as the popularity of Choral Evensong on Radio Three is not a symptom of a residual British religious sense, so much as a signal that secularism has triumphed. Religion is a concert, a “vast, moth-eaten musical brocade”, as Philip Larkin called it. The aristocratic old world, comparably, in the Fellowes version, is a tourist attraction.