Contemporary Media Coverage and Popular Culture
In the years after Bernhard died his life story still fascinates many and is the inspiration for literature, theatre, television and even comic books. In 2010 fact and fiction of the life of Bernhard is portrayed in a Dutch television series. In the series it is insinuated that writer Ian Fleming, who personally knew Bernhard from their war efforts in London, based some features of his fictional character James Bond on Bernhard, who was for instance known to enjoy a vodka martini shaken and not stirred. Next to his reputation as a womanizer Prince Bernhard was also well known for his love for fast planes, fast cars and speeding. Among the villain's henchmen in the novel and film "Thunderball" one of them is named Count Lippe. He only knew of one person who was having a great time during World War II, and that it was Prince Bernhard.
In a biographical dissertation by Dutch journalist and historian Annejet van der Zijl published in March 2010, Bernhard was called "a failure" in the history of the Dutch royal family and a "creature of his own myths". With his lifestyle and the "myths" that he created around his own person would have done "permanent damage to the integrity of the monarchy".
Read more about this topic: Prince Bernhard Of Lippe-Biesterfeld
Famous quotes containing the words contemporary, media, popular and/or culture:
“Americans have internalized the value that mothers of young children should be mothers first and foremost, and not paid workers. The result is that a substantial amount of confusion, ambivalence, guilt, and anxiety is experienced by working mothers. Our cultural expectations of mother and realities of female participation in the labor force are directly contradictory.”
—Ruth E. Zambrana, U.S. researcher, M. Hurst, and R.L. Hite. “The Working Mother in Contemporary Perspectives: A Review of Literature,” Pediatrics (December 1979)
“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity—much less dissent.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“If they have a popular thought they have to go into a darkened room and lie down until it passes.”
—Kelvin MacKenzie (b. 1946)
“It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)