coming from inside the house—often the White House. The fear such stories dramatise is not of a lone maniac but a rogue system. “Secret Service” supplies the latest inside job on British tellies. The head of the Russia desk at Mi6 (played by Gemma Arterton, pictured) suspects the Kremlin has a mole at the heart of Britain’s government. The set-up has distinct echoes of “The Night Manager”, a hit about spies and skulduggery, in both the sumptuous Mediterranean locations and the slipping of an agent into a target’s family. The dialogue has distinct echoes of every espionage show you’ve ever seen. “We can all lie to someone we love,” drawls a spymaster on autopilot. The renegade spooks of “The Night Manager” are not unusual. Even its name is not unusual: see also “The Night Agent”, another multi-series yarn, this one involving a staged bombing, CIA turncoats and (you guessed it) moles at the heart of government. These days, in fact, anyone on tv in a position of public trust is liable to betray it. In “Zero Day” a cabal orchestrates a cyber-catastrophe. “The Madness” combines white supremacists with disinformation and corporate chicanery. More television conspiracies are in the pipeline. The fix goes on. On screen, as in reality, conspiracism comes in bursts. After the assassinations of the 1960s and Watergate, the mid-1970s was a febrile period, yielding (at the cinema) “Chinatown” and “The Parallax View”. Among today’s real-world prompts—and narrative motifs—are foreign meddling in Western politics, panopticonic surveillance and the power of occult algorithms and artificial intelligence. “The Capture”, a superior conspiracy saga, focuses on official misuse of deepfakes. Social media, another newish technology, are the chief vector of conspiracism, making doomscrollers everywhere amenable to stories of Manchurian candidates and false flags. Meanwhile attitudes to authority are poisonous. In Britain and America, pollsters report, trust in government is at a cynical low. Americans have also lost faith in science, big business, police and the media; 27% of Britons think there is a conspiracy against them personally. Polarisation is part of the problem: if hated opponents win an election, they must surely have cheated. They are bound to be up to no good.
In this context, conspiracist dramas, like conspiracy theories themselves, offer a consoling pay-off. Yes, they depict a sinister world controlled by shadowy forces. But, like QAnoners and vaccine truthers, viewers derive a gratifying sense that they are in the know. In any case, as an explanation for global woes, conspiracies are more comprehensible than cock-ups and chaos, especially those uncovered in the season finale. The genre has drawbacks, too. It is hard to make a conspiracy seem convincing, a tv director confides, and the permutations of baddies and whistleblowers are limited (as “Secret Service” suggests). Government traitors, men with guns and end-of-episode twists are de rigueur. More gravely, as well as reflecting an ambient hunch that the mighty are crooked, conspiracy shows may corrosively reinforce it. (Who exactly is behind them all, a conspiracy-minded critic might wonder?) Then again, other kinds of tv crime aren’t entirely victimless. The creep of conspiracy in glitzy thrillers coincides with the retreat of a different genre: lurid tales of murdered women, whose deaths let male gumshoes earn their spurs. Of late some writers and producers have grown wary of that default scenario, say insiders, preferring spiky female roles, including spies and assassins, to decorative female corpses. The dead-girl trope implies a failure of imagination as well as a shallow view of women. But the paranoid style of crime shows and thrillers is, in its way, at least as disturbing. No longer is it just a woman’s body on the TV mortuary slab. Now it is the entire body politic.■ For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//culture/2026/05/04/turn-on-tune-in-trust-no-one-the- paranoid-style-captures-tv
Oscar Wilde’s grandson separates fact from fiction Merlin Holland sets the record straight on the Irish writer’s life May 7th 2026 “A FLYING ANGEL with an erection.” That is how Oscar Wilde’s son described the winged figure suspended in stone above his father’s tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris. In the decades after the Irish writer’s death in 1900, the offending member grew smooth from the caresses of his admirers; in 1961 vandals knocked off the testicles. Fans took to leaving greasy lipstick kisses on the tomb instead, which required corrosive cleaning. Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, spent years calling on French fonctionnaires to protect it. A glass panel went up in 2011. The sticky tributes have an oddly symbolic quality, for Wilde’s reputation has also accrued fallacies and fabrications. Mr Holland, who is the literary executor of the Wilde estate, has spent 40 years trying to strip them away.
“After Oscar” lays out everything that has been embellished in Wilde’s name by biographers, forgers, false memoirists and members of his own family. Mr Holland admits he wrote the book “with a modicum of anger, channelled into storytelling”. The book begins with Wilde’s release from prison in 1897. His fall had been swift. Just two years earlier, Wilde was the toast of London, with two plays on the West End. He was also openly in thrall to Lord Alfred Douglas, a young aristocrat. On the opening night of “The Importance of Being Earnest”, Douglas’s father brought a bouquet of rotting vegetables to throw at Wilde. Barred from entering, he prowled outside “chattering like a monstrous ape”, Wilde wrote. Later, he left a mispelled card at Wilde’s club calling him a “somdomite”. Wilde sued for libel—a disastrous decision. The defence announced its intention to call as witnesses male prostitutes with whom Wilde had had sex, forcing Wilde to withdraw his suit. He was then arrested, tried for “gross indecency” and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. His wife, Constance, took their sons abroad and changed their name to Holland. “Such was the need”, Mr Holland writes, “to dissociate the family from anything that could connect it with Oscar Wilde.”
After his release, Wilde travelled to France, hoping to be reunited with his family. Constance’s friends and relatives kept them apart. Polite society had no place for a convict and “unrepentant homosexual”. Wilde never saw his boys again. He died in Paris, penniless, at the age of 46. It did not take long for what Mr Holland calls “follow my leader” biography to set in: one writer’s conjecture was adopted by the next, without scrutiny, until it hardened into fact. The most consequential example was the theory that Wilde had died of syphilis. First published in 1912, it was still being repeated in 1987 in a celebrated biography by Richard Ellmann. Doctors who reviewed Wilde’s records have since argued that he died of cerebral meningitis following an ear injury sustained in prison. By the 1920s it had become fashionable to recall an intimate friendship with Wilde. A French poet claimed to have been his only friend in his final days in Paris—entirely ignoring the two loyal companions who had actually been at his deathbed. Forgeries appeared, too. In 2007 Mr Holland spotted fake Wilde manuscripts at an auction in San Francisco, recognising them as the work of a forger from the 1920s. Mr Holland’s own family caused its share of distortion. His father Vyvyan wrote a memoir entitled “Son of Oscar Wilde”, which Mr Holland spent years fact-checking. He found that Vyvyan, unable to resist improving on a dimly remembered past, had adorned the truth in places. (Who was it that said “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art”?) Mr Holland’s mother Thelma went further, burning pages from Vyvyan’s diary and insisting that Wilde was “basically heterosexual”. Even as Wilde’s work was revived, the family’s shame persisted. “After Oscar” is ostensibly a record of the vicissitudes of Wilde’s posthumous reputation. But it ends up being something much more interesting: an account of what happens to the people left living with a scandal they did not create. ■ For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//culture/2026/05/07/oscar-wildes-grandson-separates-fact- from-fiction
In an age of status symbols, tiaras take the crown Women worldwide are channelling royal glamour May 7th 2026 The regal aesthetic is royally back in fashion. On Pinterest searches for “bandeau tiara” and “tiara hairstyles wedding” increased by 140% and 185% between December and February, compared with the same period in 2024- 25. “We’ve seen a surge in demand for tiaras,” says Charles Leung, chief executive of Chaumet, a French jeweller that once made tiaras for Empress Joséphine. Bentley & Skinner, which supplies jewellery to Britain’s royals, has also experienced “a big increase in the sales of tiaras” in recent years, says the manager, Ilias Kapsalis. For centuries society women in America and Europe gave the tiara market its sparkle, as they had to wear them to balls and other lavish events. They
still buy them, but now heady interest in the headpieces also comes from Asia and the Middle East. Traditional tiaras feature white diamonds or pearls. Brides may wear them to make extra sure they are the centre of attention on their wedding day. Many are convertible: the jewels can be detached and worn as a necklace to another event. Women often plan to hand the item down. “The tiara is the ultimate personal heirloom,” insists Mr Leung. It “can symbolise the start of a dynasty”. In an age fascinated by conspicuous consumption, “A tiara is probably the most aspirational jewel one can have,” says Henry Bailey of Christie’s, an auction house. Little girls watching Disney films learn they are “a status symbol”. Real-life princesses, including Catherine, Princess of Wales, regularly wear them; celebrities don them at the Met Gala. And popular TV shows such as “Bridgerton” reinforce the idea that tiaras are worn by those who want to see and be seen.
If you seek a tiara for your special day, the cost will depend on the provenance as well as the number and quality of stones. Bentley & Skinner’s website advertises tiaras from £39,750 ($54,000) to £185,000. On May 13th Christie’s is selling a diamond Art Deco tiara by Cartier with an estimated value of $340,000-620,000. For some women, their crowning moment is worth every penny.■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//culture/2026/05/05/in-an-age-of-status-symbols-tiaras- take-the-crown