The Bloody Crossroads

There used to be a convention at the seamier end of the pornography market whereby models would be de-identified by way of a dark strip across their eyes. The aim of this strip, presumably, was to protect the honour of the featured models – these being the days before the internet had made us all a little less chaste. Its […]

Of all the indispensable words to have slipped their definitional moorings in the latter decades of the twentieth century – ‘iconic’, ‘tragedy’, ‘legendary’ – ‘ironic’ is perhaps the most conspicuous. Certainly its fall from semantic grace has been one of the more spectacular: where once this adjective was pressed into service to describe appropriate reversals of fortune or knowing asides […]