The pre-budget report was an uneasy compromise between a radical post-crash new direction in economic policy and a cautious orthodoxy that avoided frightening the horses.
With the publication of No Logo, she was hailed as a freedom fighter for a new and radical post-consumer culture.
It's one of history's nicer ironies that radical post-colonial thinkers happily inherited the "maritime" perspective on British history developed by their gung-ho imperialist forebears.
In many ways she's an ideal artist, and power of example, for the Obama White House: forward-looking without being radical; post-racial but also race-conscious; in love with new, in touch with old.
A control freak whose gift for subverting everyday language in surreal cut-up lyrics made him a genuinely radical post-punk voice, Smith was a man who'd rebelled against – but also internalised – the berserk discipline of a bullying father.
Vociferously black nationalist, he was still kicking ass in 2002 with his radical post 9/11 poem, Somebody Blew Up America, with its roll call of international evils perpetrated by, essentially, white men.
Next to the suicide bombings, the air strikes, and the beheadings, a closely argued 300-page monograph devoted to a radical post-colonial thesis might seem to suggest a modest literary intervention.
The PQ, which grew out of the radical post-colonial fervour of the 1960s, may just find its time is up.It was not helped by its newish young leader, André Boisclair.
For this reason he left LSE but retained an academic link first with University College London, and then in 1993 at the newly established law school at Birkbeck, where he played the role of eminence grise to younger, more assertively radical post-modern scholars.
The past 25 years, for Wheen, has unfortunately witnessed "holy warriors, anti-scientific relativists, economic fundamentalists, radical post-modernists, New-Age mystics" who reject the rationalism and belief in historical progress of the Enlightenment in favour of returning us "to a life in darkness".
