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Bolshevism, Stalinism and the Comintern: Perspectives on Stalinization, 1917-53

only as far as the emblems from the twentieth-century pantheon are involved, such as Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant or Bob Dylan. But Inglis has little sympathy for the banality of everyday popular culture. Sometimes with mild condescension and elsewhere with acrid denunciation he evaluates present-day phenomena such as reality TV and talk shows as tokens of ‘a society unable to tell the difference between [ . . . ] lust and boredom’ (p. 232). The last page suddenly offers a key that reveals the essential nature of this book – a moment reminiscent of the ‘Rosebud’ disclosure at the end of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (a film that is discussed in the book). In the last-but-one paragraph Inglis affectionately recalls The Boy’s Book of Heroes (1946), a tome filled with sketches of heroes that he had devoured again and again as a child. Its formula appears to have been very similar to the set-up of A Short History of Celebrity. Inglis has rewritten his childhood’s favourite book, replacing its original protagonists by the new champions collected during his academic career.