"Make no mistake, there is nothing grand about young Kate Middleton! Her parents may be multi-millionaires with a sprawling mansion in Berkshire, she may have been public school-educated, own her own London flat and take her holidays in Mustique but, beneath the surface, she is simply "our Kate", a modern girl like thousands of others."

I fear the paragraph above is not ironic. It is part of a wholly cringe inducing article that appears in the soi-disant new kind of newspaper i. You can read the whole nauseating piece in i's progenitor, The Independent.

I read it en route to a talk at the NLS by the author of Scott-land, a fascinating sounding book about Walter Scott. Much of the book I gather (in spite of the warm feelings aroused by the vino accompanying it's promotion I did not buy but shall wait till it's in the library before reading) is concerned with the remarkable influence that Scott has had culturally throughout the world over the last 180 years or so.

Part of his non-literary fame rests on his stage management of George IV's visit to Edinburgh in 1822 when he bigged up the king to the Scots and vice versa. I suspect the i's royal correspondent to be an acolyte of Scott in this respect if not in his prose style nor (hopefully) his cultural influence.