“It may feel as you walk past the multiplex and into the chain bookshop where Katie Price’s bestseller is stacked up, and then home to pick up the television schedules dominated by reality shows, that we live in an age when there is little room for anything but the blockbuster, the bestseller, the audience-chaser, the top celebrity. But if you listen to some of the voices out there, it turns out that this isn’t what is going on at all…”