From pineapple on the pizza to freedom of worship
Andrew O’Hagan writing in the London Review of Books
Andrew O’Hagan · Push Me Pull You: Creating the Beckhams
The Beckhams are British in a new way, a way that wealthy people who live most of the time in places like Dubai and Miami are British, loving the royal family and hating income tax while deploring the press they relentlessly deploy. They fill their days topping up their self-pity and complaining that they haven’t yet got the knighthood they so clearly deserve.
Let’s be clear about Beckham. He likes pineapple on his pizza. He can’t get enough of The Lion King. He admits that he has never read a book in his life, almost certainly including the ones he wrote himself. (He didn’t make it all the way through Posh’s either.) It is said he once posed wearing an Adolf Eichmann T-shirt and carrying a bottle of Moët, without realising who the guy on the T-shirt was, though he recognised the champagne. In his best moments, he’s a reverse Dorothy Parker, curving another déclaration folle into the back of the net. ‘We’re definitely going to get Brooklyn christened,’ he said, ‘but we don’t know into which religion.’