Laudator Temporis Acti

A.L. Rowse (1903-1997), "Rudyard Kipling," The English Spirit: Essays in Literature and History, rev. ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1966), pp. 229-245 (at 231):

Lionel Curtis, who knew Kipling well, used to tell me that he was really two men: there was the Morning Post reactionary, who hated everything about the modern world and thought it was going to the dogs (isn't it?); and, on the other side, there was the visionary, with his extreme intuitive senses, the gift of second sight, the prophetic, the truly inspired.

Cf. Rowse himself, quoted in Time magazine (November 13, 1978):

This filthy twentieth century. I hate its guts.

Rowse, "Vanishing English Landscapes," Portraits and Views, Literary and Historical (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1979), pp. 140-146 (at 142-143):

No doubt there are prefigurations of a new kind of society forming — in the creeping suburbia that is the real landscape of contemporary England, the TV culture that goes with it, the TV masts at every house (TV is the contemporary religion), the high-rise tenements to accommodate a madly inflated population for so small an island, the neuroses that go with over-population, the pushing and shoving, the violence, the drugs, the wish to escape. All I can say is that I agree with Hoskins in detesting everything about contemporary society (except its dentistry).