A brief history of celebrity

Society’s obsession with celebrity has never been more intense. But what is central to any understanding of celebrity is the crucial and formative role of the media, says TP O’Mahony

WRITING in 1969, Harford Thomas, the then deputy editor of The Guardian, said that, as a term, “the permissive society” came into common usage in Britain in the late-1960s.

In the introduction to a book entitled The Permissive Society, he traced the emergence of the term, explaining that the phrase usefully summed up an episode in social history. From the perspective of the 21st century, we can see that this was a very significant episode indeed, a period whose ramifications are still very much with us.