The simple reality is that nobody ever really liked clowns anyway

The great myth has always been that children adore clowns. No they don’t. They never have, writes Terry Prone

PROFESSOR Marshall Mc Luhan was a bit like Andy Warhol. Neither of them said much that was memorable or important, but the two of them nevertheless made it into every dictionary of quotations ever published. That was because they had a strange gift for coining sentences that rattle around the back of the public mind like the chorus of a bad song.

Warhol’s was the prediction that, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” This supposedly featured in the catalogue when he exhibited some of his work in the late 1960s in Stockholm. Another guy has tried to pull the rug out from under this one by claiming that what Warhol actually said was “In the future, everyone will be world-famous,” and the other guy, sensibly and presciently, said “Yeah. For about 15 minutes.”