In Popular Culture
In Neal Stephenson's historical fiction novel Quicksilver one of the book's chief figures, Puritan Daniel Waterhouse, appears before an illegally reconstituted Star Chamber tribunal.
In the 1983 movie The Star Chamber, Michael Douglas, playing an idealistic Los Angeles Superior Court judge frustrated about having to free obviously guilty criminals merely because of legal technicalities, learns from his mentor about a secret cabal of judges—a Star Chamber—that metes out its own brand of justice against those it determines have wrongly been set free.
In the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett, the Patrician's Palace contains the Rats Chamber, an anagrammatical equivalent to the actual Star Chamber. One of the differences is that the room is decorated with a unique fresco of dancing rats on the ceiling, rat wall paper, rat carpet, and so on, which is stated to have the effect of making people "feel as if they need a wash" after a few minutes.
In the 2006 Battlestar Galactica episode "Collaborators", the acting president of the Twelve Colonies authorized a Star Chamber which was known as 'The Circle'. They secretly tried and convicted collaborators during the Cylon Occupation and executed them.
Read more about this topic: Star Chamber
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“For those that love the world serve it in action,
Grow rich, popular and full of influence,
And should they paint or write, still it is action:
The struggle of the fly in marmalade.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Unthinking people will often try to teach you how to do the things which you can do better than you can be taught to do them. If you are sure of all this, you can start to add to your value as a mother by learning the things that can be taught, for the best of our civilization and culture offers much that is of value, if you can take it without loss of what comes to you naturally.”
—D.W. Winnicott (20th century)