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Which leads me, finally, to:8 Etonians are ambitious9 Etonians are trendy10 Etonians get everywhereFashion, like physical size, is a function of privilege. It is a deceitful myth to suppose that trends rise upwards from poor to rich Quite the reverse. The first people to catch on to new ideas are those whose wealth enables them to have disposable time, disposable money and unlimited access to new places, people and things. What’s more, the rich have the resources then to exploit new ideas or trends to their own personal profit.As evidence of this I give you Jay Jopling, by far the most influential and successful young British art-dealer of the past decade: an Old Etonian. James Palumbo, the boss of the Ministry of Sound club empire: an Old Etonian. Brent Hoberman, the co-founder of lastminute and the embodiment of the internet economy: an Old Etonian.If anti-capitalist rioting has become the New Big Thing, I take it for granted that there will be an Etonian presence somewhere about the place And now, I hope, you know why..

If you judge books by their covers, you might wonder about Elizabeth Wurtzel’s oeuvre. What kind of quest for attention would drive a young writer into posing prettily on the covers of each of her three books? Wurtzel’s first, Prozac Nation, a memoir of her life as a depressive, shows her looking gorgeous, pouting and tragic. Her second, Bitch, a mélange of observations on women in contemporary culture, shows her looking gorgeous, pouting and half-naked. Her third, a little offering called The Bitch Rules, is a new departure It shows her looking gorgeous, pouting and happy. If you judge books by their covers, you might wonder about Elizabeth Wurtzel’s oeuvre. What kind of quest for attention would drive a young writer into posing prettily on the covers of each of her three books? Wurtzel’s first, Prozac Nation, a memoir of her life as a depressive, shows her looking gorgeous, pouting and tragic.

Her second, Bitch, a mélange of observations on women in contemporary culture, shows her looking gorgeous, pouting and half-naked. Her third, a little offering called The Bitch Rules, is a new departure. It shows her looking gorgeous, pouting and happy.
Now, Elizabeth Wurtzel thinks that the photograph she used for the cover of Bitch may not have been a great idea “I had a lot of trouble with the cover of Bitch The publisher liked it, and I thought, fine. But had I been more lucid at the time I might have thought it’s not so good It got in the way of the content of the book. But I hope that some time in the future I’ll look back and it will seem like a cool gesture.”That’s the way Wurtzel talks – hopping along, apparently wondering as she goes whether she has done or said the right thing. She smiles and laughs a lot, a bright, shiny woman who looks younger than her 32 years, with her glossy, cerise lipstick and long, blonde, highlighted hair. Although she complains of jetlag, she seems energetic and eager, happy to rattle along about anything, from the intimate details of her life to the Philippine hostage crisis.Is she finally cured of the terrible depression that inspired Prozac Nation? “No, I’m not,” she says “That’s the sad part I’m still on medication Maybe I should learn to lie about this.

Because they’re making the movie of it now, and of course they are giving it a happy ending, and it would be so much more satisfying to say it did have a happy ending, nothing bad happened after that. But life isn’t like that.”In Prozac Nation, Wurtzel often seems to blame her parents for her depression. As the only child of divorced parents, she had to bear her mother’s intense expectations and her father’s total lack of interest. Wurtzel’s mother, perhaps understandably, hasn’t read the book “She doesn’t even read my articles,” Wurtzel says, sadly. “She doesn’t even read articles about me.” Then she shifts ground. “I wrote a piece recently about my addiction to Ritalin, and I rang her and warned her not to read it because it would upset her.

She did and she called me and said she was so sorry, that she had no idea what I’d been through and it was a miracle I was still alive and doing so well. That meant so much.”Wurtzel’s relationship with her father has a lot less going for it. In Prozac Nation she recalls, as a child, trying to prise his eyes open as he slept through her brief visits to him. Now, she hasn’t had any contact with him since 1990, although he made a misplaced effort to see her two years ago when she was doing a reading “He just showed up I’m working It’s not a good time to surprise someone – it’s unfair. I did my reading and asked someone to ask him to leave during the signing It’s not like my desire not to see him is totally random. If you had a father like mine, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t want to see him either.”Prozac Nation was published in 1994, at first to a mixed response “I had some terrible reviews,” Wurtzel remembers. “Some people’s reactions to the book were like people’s reactions to a depressed person – they felt impatient, that I was being self-indulgent I was heartbroken.