Of course there is any amount of snobbery and pseudery associated with the connoisseurship of wine. But still: it is a real phenomenon, coming over time to appreciate more of the complexities of taste and aroma and "feel" in the mouth that there can be in fine wine. That requires (enjoyable!) practice, paying attention, learning to discriminate, coming to recognize aesthetic qualities like balance and refinement. So yes, the more experienced wine enthusiast can detect differences that are really there, and which can be lost on the beginner (and, sadly, seem to some extent to get lost again as we get rather older). It isn't just a matter, then, of the connoisseur having different tastes in the sense of different preferences, but also the connoisseur will have different tastes in the sense of different and more complex experiences as he drinks. But let's not get too precious. Wine is there for civilized shared enjoyment, not for being pretentious about. And I'll add that there is nothing "pleb"...

Of course it isn't true! Just walk down the street with your eyes open ... Most of us just don't make it in the beauty stakes. Most of us are just very ordinary -- not even quirkily striking. Tough, but that's life. Thankfully, beauty isn't everything, and with luck we get by. We non-beautiful people even manage to hook up with other non-beautiful people (or at least, that's how it usually goes, though as the poet Robert Graves remarked, beautiful girls can have strange tastes in men ...), and the world rattles on and gets populated all the same. It would quite be as daft to seriously pretend that we are all beautiful as to pretend that we are all very athletic, all very smart, or indeed all very nice. We're not. And just as telling someone dumb that they are smart does them no favours, telling someone particularly plain and pasty that they are beautiful won't make them feel better (they can see what is in the mirror and now have a deluded or lying friend too). Is there any kind of...

My colleagues raise a number of points, some rather puzzling, which deserve more that there is space for here. But some quick reflections: 1. Love of the good, to take Charles's example, may be a fine and noble thing. But something surely can be fine and noble without being beautiful. In fact, by my reckoning, both Charles and Richard seem to be prepared to stretch "beauty" and "beautiful" in ways I don't find at all natural or helpful (I'm wickedly reminded of the old hippie all-purpose "beautiful, man!" when Richard talks of Ghandi). They both seem to think being "worthy of our deep aesthetic delight" is ipso facto sufficient for being beautiful. Well, in so far as I understand the phrase, I would have thought that the Grosse Fuge, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment , Titian's The Flaying of Marsyas , and King Lear are, if anything is, worthy of our deepest aesthetic delight. But it would seem a quite inept response to describe any of those as beautiful . The list could be greatly...