A Guardian reader asks,

Do some women really suffer angst over such mind numbing trivia, or were you just pressured to write a piece on this subject?

The piece in question, by the chronically unhappy Laurie Penny, concerns the socio-political ramifications of ladies’ swimsuits. Specifically, the bikini. Ms Penny’s approach to this crushing social issue is a tad presumptuous and long on assertion. Among its gems is this:

The bikini itself has a sinister semiotic history.

See, you just don’t get that kind of thing in the Times.

Those with a stake in the mythology of the garment now focus on its namesake island as a tropical paradise, but bikini ideology is poisoned with the cultural fallout of the mid-20th century in more ways than one.

Bikini “mythology” is something of a stretch and the word “marketing” might have been less grandiose. But bikini ideology? A whole ideology? Such a thing exists? Alas, Ms Penny is much too rushed to elaborate, beyond stating her belief that,

Wearing a bikini is no longer associated with pleasure and daring, but with anxiety, dieting rituals and joyless physical performance… The bikini body is not supposed to be naturally occurring: it is a quasi-religious state of myth and artifice to which only the truly virtuous can aspire.

Curse those Special K adverts. Is there nothing they can’t ruin? Thankfully, there’s time for plenty of earnest disapproval:

This summer, women of all ages are once more being exhorted to get the perfect “bikini body” by every tabloid, gossip circular and glossy magazine. Singer Katy Perry and heiresses the Kardashian sisters are among this week’s “best bikini body” celebrities, and ordinary women everywhere are trying to emulate their fairytale lifestyles by purchasing a particular cellulite-busting body scrub or embarking on a bizarre starvation diet.

I somehow doubt that Guardian readers spend too much time following the exhortations and “cultural edicts” of Grazia or Heat magazine, as if they could hold the secret to eternal contentedness. Nor, I should think, does Ms Penny or her elevated colleagues. Perhaps the effect is limited to those ordinary women, who, one might suppose, have no minds of their own to make choices of their own, and who exist as mere flotsam on a sea of social pressures. 

[Cough] Classic sentence. [Cough]

Terry Eagleton has been one of the great minds of the European left seemingly since Cromwell.

This addition to our ongoing series comes from the author and Nation columnist Dave Zirin. It’s his opening line. The second line, however, notes Eagleton’s “absence of understanding” and subsequent sentences explain why the professor’s most recent article, discussed here, is a dusty old trope and “elitist hogwash” – a polemic that’s “more about Eagleton’s alienation than our own.”

I’m sure Professor Eagleton would have some achingly clever reply, given his ability to compare suicide bombing with “avant-garde theatre.” And bearing in mind our recent discussion, it’s perhaps worth noting the professor’s belief that, “being a champagne socialist is better than being no socialist at all.” This was said while gushing over the “great communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid,” a man who wrote a series of Hymns To Lenin, who renewed his party membership in 1956, and whose death, according to Eagleton, spared him from the “dark night of Thatcherism.” An elected Conservative government being so much worse than, say, Soviet tanks in Budapest and hundreds of thousands of fleeing dissidents.

Those who’ve followed Eagleton’s pronouncements will have spotted that the professor is often hostile to dissent, in particular to those whose thinking and experiences take them away from the boneyards of the left. According to the professor, the knighting of Salman Rushdie was “the establishment’s reward for a man who moved from being a remorseless satirist of the west to cheering on its criminal adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.” No evidence for this dastardly conspiracy was deemed necessary and Rushdie’s supposed “fondness for the Pentagon’s politics” is apparently all that needs to be said, signalling as it must the man’s innate wickedness.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Eagleton’s umbrage on the subject was shared by Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini, who told the world that the decision to praise “the apostate” had “insulted Islamic sanctities” and was “a blatant example of anti-Islamism.” While the Guardian’s Priyamvada Gopal railed against Rushdie’s apostasy as only a lecturer in postcolonial studies can. Rushdie’s divergence from Ms Gopal’s own cartoon worldview – including his dislike of tyranny and his defence of such heresies as intellectual freedom – had apparently reduced the author to “a giggling hack corralled into attacking his ruler’s enemies.” 

Eagleton also hissed at Christopher Hitchens, denouncing him as an “establishment groupie” who has “made his peace… with capitalism” and “learned how to stop worrying about imperialism and love Paul Wolfowitz.” Like his Guardian colleague Bidisha, our esteemed literary theorist imagines he has some proprietary claim on proper, radical thought. Such that radical thought must entail “questioning the foundations of the western way of life,” which in turn must entail having opinions almost exactly like his own. Norm Geras, a lefty in an altogether different league, took apart Eagleton’s assumptions with admirable patience. A venture for which Norm will no doubt be condemned and cast out in due course. 

I fear it’s time for more classic sentences from the Guardian, this time care of Professor Terry Eagleton, who obliges with a volley of inadvertent nuggets:

If the Cameron government is bad news for those seeking radical change, the World Cup is even worse.

This bold declaration is followed by,

If every rightwing think-tank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice and compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be the same – football.

And,

No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up, bar socialism. And in the tussle between them, football is several light years ahead.

Ba-dum. Tissshh.

The article in question, Football: A Dear Friend to Capitalism, bears a typically presumptuous subheading:

The World Cup is another setback to any radical change. The opium of the people is now football.

It’s strange how readily the professor assumes that an enthusiasm for football is a “distraction” that’s “holding back” some “radical change” that would otherwise be embraced by enthusiasts of the game. Yes, that must be why the working man still hasn’t recognised radical socialism as the glorious thing it is. Isn’t it terrible when your revolution beckons and yet people would rather do something else, something they like? But football fans just don’t know their own minds, see, being mere dupes of the capitalist machine and its dastardly overlords. Thankfully, our esteemed literary critic knows what the people really want, secretly, deep down inside those dim and hoodwinked brains. Professor Eagleton spies some variation of false consciousness whenever the proletariat dares to see things differently from its egalitarian superiors – an enlightened caste of ageing, embittered Marxists whose keenness of vision shows them, and only them, how things really are.

Readers may recall the professor is also fond of the Unargued Assertion. And so we get some of this:

Modern societies deny men and women the experience of solidarity, which football provides to the point of collective delirium.

Quite how the experience of solidarity can be “denied” by modern societies remains oddly unspecified. Perhaps dear bewildered Terry imagines common interest is something that people can no longer experience – serendipitously or voluntarily – say, via the global communication tools made possible and ubiquitous by… oh yes, capitalism.

John Meredith steers us to another Classic Sentence from the Guardian. Two, actually.

I’d like to say that this encounter has propelled me to carry the bag with defiance, but instead it has left me slightly bruised. I’ve since bought an incredibly sombre pair of jeans – unusual for me.

So says Mr Charlie Porter, writing of his polite yet clearly traumatic encounter with Canary Wharf security. 

All I needed for the day was a notebook, my iPod Touch, a Kindle and some keys. They all slotted snugly into a patent red zip-up bag by the young London menswear designer James Long.

Looking sharp, Mr Porter.

And it’s not just rather fabulous. It’s also a political statement.

I find the word “manbag” such a bore: it is often used mockingly, and it categorises what I think should be category-free.

Then the horror began.

Yes, I know. You want another of those Classic Sentences from the Guardian. Oh, look. Two stuck together:

Paul McCartney once said: “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, we’d all be vegetarians.” Well, if people could see the state of war-torn Iraq, we’d all be cyclists.

That’s one of the profound ruminations of Mr Mark Boyle (pictured below), a “social homeopath,” “pro-activist” and advocate of moneyless living.

Those unfamiliar with Mr Boyle and his intensely radical brain can savour not one but two Guardian profiles, in which we follow our hero’s philosophy and everyday travails: 

To be the change I wanted to see in the world, it unfortunately meant I was going to have to give up cash, which I initially decided to do for a year. I got myself a caravan, parked it up on an organic farm where I was volunteering and kitted it out to be off-grid. Cooking would now be outside – rain or shine – on a rocket stove; mobile and laptop would be run off solar; I’d use wood I either coppiced or scavenged to heat my humble abode, and a compost loo for humanure.

If the term “humanure” is new to some readers, the fascinating details of hands-on sewerless composting toilets can be found here. It’s a world of romantic pre-industrial charm.