Michael Jackson and his trial hold a mirror to modern Western civilisation and its blurring of fact and fiction, writes Terry Eagleton.
John Paul II became Pope in 1978, just as the emancipatory 1960s were declining into the long political night of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As the economic downturn of the early 1970s began to bite, the Western world made a decisive shift to the right, and the transformation of an obscure Polish bishop to John Paul II was part of this transition.