Bob Dylan won this year’s Nobel Prize, ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.’ Which basically tells you everything you need to know about the 21st century. Where the 20th century gave us the lilting romanticism of Yeats, the haunting modernity of Eliot, and the wintry stoicism of Bunin, we answered with… Dylan: a whinging, narcissistic hippie who sounds always to be in the throes of a minor stroke.