Mythologies is a masterpiece of analysis and interpretation. At its heart, Barthes's collection of essays about the "mythologies" of modern life treats everyday objects and ideas - from professional wrestling, to the Tour de France, to Greta Garbo's face - as though they are silently putting forward arguments. Those arguments are for modernity itself, the way the world is, from its class structures, to its ideologies, to its customs. In Barthes's view, the mythologies of the modern world all tend towards one aim: making us think that the way things are, the status quo, is how they should...