[In the following review, Heron outlines the tenor of Eco's thought in Faith in Fakes, noting his insights and inconsistencies.]

Time is going faster. The constant ‘past-ising’ process that Eco noted as a pervasive feature of American civilisation in 1975—when the Nostalgia sections in the big record stores held racks devoted to the Seventies as well as the Sixties—has accelerated and is no longer the strictly transatlantic phenomenon he then perceived.

Much of the opening essay in Faith in Fakes is taken up with remarking the symbolic transformations present in America's pursuit and capture of the Old World's cultural heritage—in the Hearst Castle, the Getty Museum and the Museum of the City of New York, as well as the numerous kitsch exhibition palaces that house elaborate artistic and architectural simulations. This cultural appropriation could be construed as an artificial lengthening of the past. These days the instant manufacture of nostalgia stems as much from a paradoxically opposing impulse: to yank back what we can of yesterday's continuities with today, to cohere them into a longer present, before they enter the snapping jaws of history.

In ‘The Multiplicity of the Media’, a piece dated eight years later, Eco describes the public effects of technological change that have led us to this condition of evanescent realities, in which new densities of everyday knowledge crowd out old. This instructive and important essay is itself offered as a major revision of the one that precedes it in the book, ‘Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare’, his 1967 proposal that strategies of opposition to the dominant messages of the mass media should emphasise the plurality of interpretations available to those on the receiving end, and the possibilities for critical decoding. Better and more democratic that the audience be schooled in waging its own daily wars on received meanings than merely to fight for a new regime of Truth from above.

It still holds that we are more than blankly passive consumers of whatever the TV screen beams into our living-rooms. But this is an immeasurably relativised degree of power within Eco's later formulation of an empire of signs that stretches its cross-referenced web of meanings all around us—through television, fashion, show-biz gossip, advertising, brand names and mass paperbacks. Think of Dallas and Dynasty, Coca-Cola and Coronation Street, as well as the burgeoning technologies that quicken the pace of information and its absorption into daily life, whether in comic strips, computer science or Hollywood films. Eco's first image of the desolate obsolescence spawned by this postmodernity is Kubrick's once innovative 2001, which now appears nothing more than a shoddy imitation of its successors in the Star Wars league.

This collection provides its own incidental commentary on the way cultural realities rapidly spin out of the orbit of our perceptual grasp. There is no slowly ripening set of arguments, but a busy ferment of ideas that are often mutually contradictory. This is, after all, anthologised journalism, with a few longer articles from monthly reviews thrown in. Its inconsistencies, which Eco readily acknowledges, can be allowed as those of the guerrilla intellectual, constantly on the run, a role he defends against the anticipated criticism of an American academic audience.

Eco's ability to bring to the profound erudition of the medievalist and semiotician a freewheeling spontaneity that makes connective sparks fly between academic concerns and those of the immediate social landscape is argument enough for this role's validity. That he can write with equal agility on such topics as the World Cup, St Thomas Aquinas, and how the wearing of tight blue jeans constricts the interior life as well as the body (while those given to a cerebral existence function better in loose garments), in a style that is both serious and diverting, is an achievement unparalleled in British journalism.

In Italy, though, where fewer people read books (because of the relatively late spread of literacy and the historical dominance of dialects over a nationally unifying language), you are more likely to find literary and cultural debate of some substance, and at some length, in daily or weekly columns. Sciascia, Calvino and Pasolini have been no strangers to these ephemeral regions either.

The constraints of the medium do not wholly explain the incongruities in Eco's own messages. The contradictions are not always temporal, theories brusquely revised with the passing of years. There's a tendency to overgeneralise, and to nurture analogies and parallels at the expense of what these do not share. His rich knowledge of the medieval period is exercised time and again through projections on to our own age of uncertainties, something he also did in The Name of the Rose, where the proliferating heresies and millenarianism of the fourteenth century found apocalyptic echoes in the violent political dissent that brought the Seventies to their drastically repressive close in Italy.

While in many ways these are wonderfully lucid examples of how the past does help us make sense of the present, they lose their fluidity when Eco moves them into the realm of eternal recurrence, history as repeated patterns with inescapable outcomes, instead of the dialectic of change which so much else of his writing suggests. And this static version of history leads him in one instance into explaing away both the Red Brigades and the Montoneros through the existence of violence as a biologically coded force that will out in the event of a protracted national peace. Yet he has also argued that football, war and California death cults alike contain the anger and violence that might otherwise find political targets.

But Eco is, above all, a professional doubter, quizzical, ironic, a writer who sees all systems, political and philosophical, as impermanent, and who embodies both the revolutionary optimism and the apocalyptic pessimism of this attitude's double potential. It is this, and the need for special rigour, that braces his disputations with those giants of cultural theory, Barthes and Foucault, in an excellent synthesising essay on the elusive and ubiquitous nature of power in late 20th-century society. It is this that also mediates his stance of sardonic detachment where the reader might wish for more passionate political engagement. Read him not only for the delicious pleasures of interpretation to be found in his classic account of Casablanca's undying cult status as ‘not one movie’ but a synopsis of movies, or his elegant classification of ‘ten little middle ages’. Above all, Eco deserves to be read for the same reason he himself accords homage to Aquinas—as a man who reminds us ‘to think new things’.