A guru of postmodernism, Baudrillard was best-known as a critic of contemporary culture. His polemical works include Forget Foucault (1977, trs. 1989) and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991, trs. 1995). The latter is not, as it may sound, a piece of revisionist history, but a meditation on the way in which listeners and viewers are trapped in a maelstrom of stories, scripts, paradigms and icons determining how the media present events, to the extent that they in effect live in a virtual reality.