References in Popular Culture
- J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, remarked that the building resembled Sauron's temple to Morgoth on Númenor. It is also mentioned in The Notion Club Papers.
- Dorothy Sayers' 1936 mystery novel Gaudy Night is set in Oxford, and one of the most important concluding conversations between Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane takes place on the balustraded circular rooftop of the Radcliffe Camera. ]
- Elizabeth Kostova's novel The Historian includes a very intense scene set in the interior of the Radcliffe Camera.
- The Camera was used as a location in the films Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), Opium Wars (Yapian zhanzheng) (1997), The Saint (1997), and The Red Violin (1998).
- The structure is seen in the 2008 film The Golden Compass. It is also mentioned in Lyra's Oxford, a book in the universe of His Dark Materials.
- The building is also seen in the Inspector Morse, Inspector Lewis and Endeavour television series, set in Oxford.
Read more about this topic: Radcliffe Camera
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)