The rise of the nano-influencer: how brands are turning to common people | Richard Godwin

For his book Mimesis, the German-Jewish literary critic Erich Auerbach undertook a grand survey of western literature from his wartime exile in Istanbul. He wanted to show that literature was becoming ever more democratic in its representation of reality, ever more attentive to the human individual. From Homer’s gods and monsters, we had moved through Shakespeare’s warriors and kings, to Austen’s ladies, Dickens’s merchants and Zola’s workers, down into Woolfian streams of consciousness. Here, at least, was a sort of moral progress to set against the darkness of the Third Reich.