Anthony Eden - Eden in Popular Culture

Eden in Popular Culture

As Secretary of State for War in 1940, Eden authorised the setting-up of the Local Defence Volunteers (soon renamed the Home Guard). In the film of the TV sitcom Dad's Army, the (fictional) Walmington-on-Sea platoon is formed in response to Eden's radio broadcast. The debonair Sergeant Wilson takes enormous pride in being often said to resemble Eden.

Eden is mentioned by Ed Norton on The Honeymooners saying that because of the residency requirements that Anthony Eden could never be a member of The Racoon Lodge.

Eden is also mentioned in a song by The Kinks, "She's Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina" from the 1969 album Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire).

Eden is mentioned in the 1993 film The Remains of the Day when Anthony Hopkins´s character mentions that Eden has also been a guest at Darlington Hall.

Eden appears as a character in the 2008 play Never So Good—portrayed as a hysterical, pill-addicted wreck, spying on members of his own Cabinet by ordering government chauffeurs to report on their comings and goings. He is shown being overwhelmed by the chaos of the Suez Crisis and eventually forced out of office by his Conservative Party colleagues, at the urging of the American government.

Eden appears as a character in James P. Hogan's science-fiction novel The Proteus Operation.

Antifolk band The Atomic Penguins released a free album download, titled 'Touch My Chin, Anthony Eden'.

The first season of the UK TV series The Hour revolves around the Suez Crisis and the effect of journalism and censorship on public perception of Eden and his government as a metaphor for modern Western military involvement in the Middle East.

Read more about this topic:  Anthony Eden

Famous quotes containing the words eden, popular and/or culture:

    “The flame from the angel’s sword in the garden of Eden has been catalysed into the atom bomb; God’s thunderbolt became blunted, so man’s dunderbolt has become the steel star of destruction.”
    —Sean O’Casey (1884–1964)

    “We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.”
    —Susan Sontag (b. 1933)

    “The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions.... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art.... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.”
    —Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)