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...