AS Byatt, novelist and critic

A 100 writers and thinkers were asked: Left and right defined the 20th century. What's next? Hardly any of them think the world will get better in the coming decades; many think it will get worse

We will be governed by a kind of consensus populism—beliefs, ideas and policies that arise on blogs, websites, focus groups and so on. (Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton announced their candidacies on the web.) This has its appeal. It is also frightening, as Tocqueville found American democracy, because it leads to tyranny of the majority.

It goes with vast quantities of not wholly accurate information—Wikipedia is splendid and maddening.

AS Byatt