Is it interesting to consider the production and reception of a Mills & Boon in relation to the wider culture? Also yes. Is Middlemarch better than a Mills & Boon? Yes. It’s the kind of question that gets confused with establishing a hierarchy of artworks themselves. Is the ability to read The Dream of the Rood in the original of intrinsically greater value than a deep-dive into the appeal of a hugely famous contemporary figure and what it might tell us about the world? (“ The ruler’s tree was worthily adorned / With gems yet I could see beyond that gold / The ancient strife of wretched men”, in Richard Hamer’s translation, somehow seems apposite.) The reality is that those hellbent on requiring education to be “useful” would be just as opposed to the idea of students sitting in a language lab learning Anglo-Saxon (me, 35 years ago, still traumatised) as they would be with an American cohort of 21st-century undergraduates analysing the lyrics of Watermelon Sugar and Harry’s ad campaigns for Gucci. In a week that saw the continuing decimation of humanities in the UK – the University of Roehampton, for example, this September proposes to close its English literature, film, photography, philosophy and linguistics degrees, among others – the idea of building a course around an icon of popular culture is strikingly at odds with a government that believes there must be a demonstrable line between learning and employment (were such a thing even vaguely possible). It concluded with information about the star’s forthcoming projects, and a warning that they were still “very hush-hush”.
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Sitting down to work on the book in the aftermath of David Bowie’s death and the ensuing “bubbling cauldron of grief”, he writes, “I realised just how productive celebrity culture is: how much it shapes us how we chart celebrity careers against our own ambitions how we devour the gossip with a mix of ironic detachment and zealous emotional investment and how useful it is as a social glue that binds us together in voyeuristic fascination.”Ĭertainly, Styles fits the bill when I asked for the inside track from my 16-year-old twin nieces, who recently queued for nine hours in Dublin in order to secure the best spot at his concert, sustained only by their mother’s mercy-dash deliveries of chips, I got a series of WhatsApp messages far, far longer than this piece. Photograph: JMEnternational for Brit Awards/Getty Images Harry Styles, who won a Brit award last year for his single, Watermelon Sugar.
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