The French Republic had to be built but then it had to be preserved. Its very attempts to conserve itself in the face of constant instability however, is what creates the tension and magic of France.
Although previously dismissed as fanciful and tedious, the world of E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops in fact bears an unsettling resemblance to our own.
For all his qualities as a filmmaker, Peter Jackson’s representation of Denethor shows how he is unable to fuse the genius of Tolkien and the rich sensibility he brought to bear in what he termed ‘the cauldron of story’ – the common weal of imagination that produced the great sagas, Old English epics and folklore – into his own art.
All the joy has gone out of modern Tennis, which privileges power and mathematical strategic thinking. It’s time to rediscover what makes ball games so much fun – comedy, lightness and a sense of play.
As Britons fulfil their Census obligations this week, they’ll do well to take a note from Sir Ernest Benn’s libertarian resistance to bureaucracy.
As Proust noted, our incremental memories of the world are the foundation of our lives – but where have they gone?
The Covid-19 pandemic has led to endless list-making and tally-counting. History shows us that this is a fundamental human need.
Blindness offers a metaphor for the perils of worldly delusion. And the physically blind can sometimes discover new ways of seeing.
Cricket was one of the few sports that was played near-normally this summer – its modern form is a welcome emblem of global connection.
In the BBC’s documentary Once Upon a Time in Iraq, we are invited to not avert our eyes from the long catastrophe of Iraq and to leave grand judgments about the rights and wrongs of intervention and dictatorship to one side.
The pioneers of Enlightenment believed a new spirit of human sympathy could provide a lasting basis for political association – the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg, satirized that ethic in grand style.
In an era of social distancing, the city is stripped of its landscape of adventure and danger, its quality of ‘sheer life’.
The mantra ‘following the science’ has become a commonplace of the coronavirus vocabulary. And indeed, social distancing represents a virtually unparalleled opportunity for scientists to
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