Guardian: Official: Britons are most cultured Europeans
The Italians have Michelangelo, the French Molière and the Germans Beethoven. But, according to an Italian survey, the British—the beer-swilling, tabloid-reading, supposedly sports-crazy British—are more cultured than any of them.

Presumably, that’s cultured as in Petri dish.

This sort of snobbery really winds me up: beer-swilling, tabloid-reading and watching sport are cultural. You can’t compare amounts of culture; everyone in the world is surrounded by the stuff 24 hours a day.

Unless they live in Dumfries.