Publicity created a central position for the politician in a transnational communicative space. The politician played a ‘personal’ role as a public persona. Competition forced commercial newspapers to focus on entertainment, which hurt political coverage but benefitted individual politicians. Particularly politicians with eccentric physiques and props profited from human interest journalism. Politicians’ ‘complex’ personalities, moreover, provided food for psychological analyses. Possibilities to visualize politicians and their private lives – literally in photographs; figuratively in character sketches – completed this personal appeal. Mass media favoured political personalities over abstract institutions. Newspapers projected family values onto politicians that enabled bourgeois readers to identify with them. This focus on politicians and their private lives made them ‘celebrities’. In celebrity reporting, monarchs enjoyed an advantage: they were famous by descent, provided entertaining pomp, and stood above partisanship. Yet journalists described charismatic career politicians, greeted by excited crowds on political journeys, in royal terms as well. These celebrities functioned as ‘brands’. A brand name buttressed a politician’s position but could also be exploited commercially. The media focus on the personal shaped expectations for politicians to become mediagenic and ‘special’ – to make the private public. The celebrity culture surrounding a brand-name politician finally underpinned the imagined community and widened the scope of politics.

This chapter continues the task of considering what, beyond law as it is often imagined, accounts for judicial decision-making. It explores work investigating the influence of motivated reasoning on judges’ behavior, including that which emphasizes the influence of judges’ desire to satisfy the expectations of groups such as their professional peers. It examines the celebrity culture that has arisen around many Supreme Court justices as providing an avenue for the influence of motivated cognition. It also explores other research into the influence of psychological phenomena, such as heuristics and biases, on judges’ decision-making and finally considers the significance of our tendency to notice bias more readily in others than in ourselves.

This chapter considers the ways in which Rushdie’s fiction engages with globalization, a process that intensified in the 1990s and which became a central theme in his fiction from The Moor’s Last Sigh onwards. This is especially pressing in Rushdie’s work in considerations of the global circulation of peoples, goods, and cultural productions, most pertinently explored in The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and Fury. Focusing both on the aesthetics of these novels and their wider cultural contexts, I argue that Rushdie’s post-fatwa novels showcase a shift in his view of the transglobal world, which can be traced on three levels: the portrayal of space, the role attributed to creativity, and the emotional response globalization elicits.