In an excellent essay on Sándor Márai, published in his collection “Inner Workings”, Coetzee writes: “He [Márai] has behaved like a caricature of the bourgeois intellectual, scorning the rabble of the right and the rabble of the left, retreating into his private enjoyments.”

It’s understandable and to a certain degree defendable to scorn the hoi polloi, as long as you keep your private enjoyments limited to the night.