Everything, All the Time, Everywhere

Stuart Jeffries is a journalist and author. He was for many years on the staff of the Guardian, working as subeditor, TV critic, Friday Review editor and Paris correspondent. He now works as a freelance writer, mostly for the Guardian, Spectator, Financial Times and the London Review of Books. He has written two books Mrs Slocombe’s Pussy: Growing Up in Front of the Telly (2000) and Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (2016).

But where do these ideas come from and how have they impacted on the world? In his brilliant history of a dangerous idea, Stuart Jeffries tells a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and continue to today. He tells this history through a riotous gallery that includes, amongst others: David Bowie * the Ipod * Frederic Jameson * the demolition of Pruit-Igoe * Madonna * Post-Fordism * Jeff Koon's 'Rabbit' * Deleuze and Guattari * the Nixon Shock * "The Bowery" series * Judith Butler * Las Vegas * Margaret Thatcher * Grand Master Flash * "I Love Dick "* the RAND Corporation * the Sex Pistols * Princess Diana * the Musee D'Orsay * Grand Theft Auto* Perry Anderson * Netflix * 9/11
We are today scarcely capable of conceiving politics as a communal activity because we have become habituated to being consumers rather than citizens. Politicians treat us as consumers to whom they must deliver. Can we do anything else than suffer from buyer's remorse?