Raffles is a delicious creation – sleek, debonair, privileged and utterly honourable (apart from when he's stealing things).
Like Pixar's animated masterwork, WALL-E, it posits what is now a familiar dystopian scenario: a future world so utterly polluted that a privileged part of mankind has moved on to a specially created space station called Elysium to live a sybaritic life while depressed proles remain behind.
"She was the most extraordinary, effervescent human being and all her family and friends felt so privileged to have known her. "We are all utterly devastated and have sought such comfort in the beautiful condolences we have received from everyone".
This argument is of course utterly question begging against a view that holds that there is no privileged standard of rest (the view Clarke mistakenly attributes to Leibniz)!
In his study of the Post-Boom Donald L. Shaw writes that Mario Benedetti was very critical of Boom writers like García Márquez who, in Benedetti's view, "represent a privileged class that had access to universal culture and were thus utterly unrepresentative of average people in Latin America".
It may be a commentary on the nature of performance, but it is itself an utterly objectionable one, reflective only of a certain kind of chic-inflected privileged-white-boy solipsism.
Vaz said the South Yorkshire police's handling of the situation had been "utterly inept"; the force had allowed itself to hand over sensitive information to a journalist and granted him privileged access to the execution of a search warrant.
