I want peace!" Raised in relative privilege in the Soviet Union, she has feeble economic prospects in New York: "Wash dishes in a lousy restaurant?
In many ways the surge in buy-backs is a symptom of the rich world's feeble growth prospects.But it could also be a source of trouble, for two main reasons.
Thus did the unchanging reports of the accidental deaths of celebrities like the Princess of Wales and John F. Kennedy Jr. become epics that titillated for days, with a cast of hundreds, many of them willing to perform on television free in exchange for the prospect, however feeble, of instant stardom.
Deflation has set in (prices across the single-currency area fell by 0.2% in the year to December) and, with Germany's economy wobbling, the region's growth prospects look ever feebler.
Growth is too low, unemployment too high, the recovery is feeble and we face the prospect of long term mediocrity if policy makers don't get their act together soon.
A £3.5 billion ($5.6 billion) windfall from the sale of 4G spectrum rights helped spare the chancellor's blushes.Mr Osborne got some respite from the OBR, which put poor growth prospects down to a feeble business cycle rather than a permanent loss of economic potential.
"The world is stuck in a period of sub-par growth and consequently feeble price pressures, and there is little prospect of this changing any time soon given the structural headwinds still facing economies in East and West," he said.
And, yes, this skips over the fragility of the euro, the International Monetary Fund's projections of feeble growth in the euro zone, and the prospect of grief from France's engagement in Afghanistan or a heightening of tensions with Iran.
Already lumbered with feeble economic growth and high unemployment, Iranians now face the prospect of sharp rises in prices of food, fuel and transport.
The world we live in – economically shaky, politically feeble, menaced by zealots, with a fearful populace half-elated by the prospect of catastrophe yet still urgently searching for scapegoats – is only too similar to that described by Eco in his survey of 19th-century Europe.
