In Fiction and Popular Culture
Notable fictitious alumni include President Josiah Bartlet from the television series The West Wing and Andrew Bond, the father of Ian Fleming's James Bond and Jim Hacker, the fictitious Minister and Prime Minister of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister (in which the Prime Minister is regularly derided by his Permanent Secretary for not having attended Oxford or Cambridge).
The LSE features in the book, Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis. The autobiographical book, charts how Lewis's career in investment banking was begun while enrolled at the university. First published in 1989, it is considered one of the books that defined Wall Street during the 1980s, along with Bryan Burrough and John Helyar's Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, and the fictional The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.
In John LeCarré's spy novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the detention of two Czech academics at the LSE is ordered by the character Bill Haydon.
The LSE is mentioned in the film The Social Network, as being one of the first three UK universities to have a Facebook network, along with Oxford and Cambridge.
Read more about this topic: London School Of Economics
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“Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)
“Party action should follow, not precede the creation of a dominant popular sentiment.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)