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
Famous quotes containing the words fiction, popular and/or culture:
“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)