The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

of The Spectator and this week my guest is our occasional contributor and admired writer Stuart Jeffries,

who were not reviewing or writing journalism.

It seems to make a kind of career in charting the intellectual background to the culture wars.

His last book was The Grand Hotel Abyss, which was The life of the academics known as the Frankfurt School.

And his new one is called Everything All the Time Everywhere, How We Became Postmodern.

Stuart, welcome.

Hello.

This idea of postmodernism, which, you know, when I were a lad, was a very sort of, very arcane

concepts, really, in academia and in theory. And it seems now to

become an absolutely central issue in the culture war. You know, your enemies are postmodern. Postmodernism

is what's responsible for the imminent collapse of society. What actually is postmodernism? How do you define it?

It's a nightmare to define because it's a linguistic black hole. It's both something that characterises

architecture in the sense that there was modernism, which was tower blocks essentially. You know,

you think of a lecoblecier and all those kind of things,

and rectilinear, living like a machine, and then the rebellion against that kind of modernism,

which you can see all over the Docklands, you know, go to London Docklands, and you see these

endlessly quoting, you know, past historical styles pastishing them, and that kind of giddy, fun appropriation of old cultures and all that kind of stuff is

postmodernism in a sense.

But there are other rival and very different definitions of postmodernism.

They're multiple, confusingly, in a properly postmodern way.

...