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This article is a response to Bill Scharz's review of my book, Stuart Hall (Polity, 2003). The circumstances of his 'review' and my response to it are outlined in the first two pages of the article. My book was the first full-length treatment of the published work of Stuart Hall. Hall's Directorship of the Birmingham Centre is widely agreed to be courageous and the source of an exciting and stimulating intellectual and political environment. As such it bred unusually strong ties of loyalty to both Hall and the project of Cultural Studies that he inspired. Schwarz's 'review' richly illustrates this loyalty and pays fulsome tribute to the intellectual debt that Schwarz owes to Hall. My article tries to rescue the central arguments that I made in the book from the spin Schwarz puts upon them. It also tries to give an interpretation for the approach he adopts and to show why I believe it possesses insuperable limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the 1899 work of Thorstein Veblen, `The Theory of the Leisure Class,' regarding rich people. Public invincibility of the rich; Information on Bill Gates, founder and owner of Microsoft, and Warren Buffett, chief executive officer of Berkshire-Hathaway, two of the richest people in the world; Three developments that have combined to transform the dynamic emulatory conduct of the rich that Veblen failed to anticipate.