By continuing to use the site, you agree to our use of cookies and to abide by our Terms and Conditions. We in turn value your personal details in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
Please log in or register. Registered visitors get fewer ads.
I don’t really know if it’s awful but it’s supposed to be a morality tale, albeit wildly over-produced.
Man kills his great love in a fit of jealousy and is consumed by guilt and regret. That’s the basic template for an entire genre of country/bluegrass music: the murder ballad.
I don’t see what banning it is meant to achieve to be honest?
I’ve been in and around rugby clubs all my life and I can’t honestly say as I’ve ever encountered anybody that would think something like that, much less say it to a woman, and I’ve known some proper boneheaded howlers.
That’s not banter whoever came out with that is deeply, deeply disturbed.
A man who took the Sermon on the Mount and used it as the basis for an entire life in politics, embracing the radical Christ of non-conformist Chapel teaching and placing him at the centre of British Socialism. Deeply principled, unwilling to compromise and incapable of the deviousness, bartering and fighting dirty which has been so much the hallmark of political life.
Can you imagine anywhere on today’s policy spectrum that would have been home to George, Keith? He’d be hated by party leader’s at Westminster and Fleet Street editors alike because he’d recognise them for what they are.
Apologies for the delay in replying, I’ve only just seen this.
Yes, you’re no doubt correct: if not for the various Western European expeditions little or nothing would remain in the way of ancient artefacts and Egyptology as a scholarly discipline wouldn’t exist today.
I’ve got a quick book recommendation here for you as regards Byron and Greece, there’s a few knocking about up at Hay but Minta’s ‘On a voiceless shore’ would be my pick of the bunch.
As a general overview Mazower’s recent history of the Greek Revolution would be hard to beat. I had this as a birthday present a couple of years back and loved it. ðŸ‘
The boys were saying exactly that on the way home from Bristol yesterday. If Flynn was still about everybody seemed to reckon we’d have been a shoo-in for the play-off places.
We are. The trouble is he’s become so much part of the furniture he gets taken for granted. It will dawn on people just how pivotal Matt has been when the day comes he’s not around anymore.
I had a quick listen, John, and I’m a bit baffled as to why Maitlis was trying to shoe-horn race, as in racism, into the equation? Elgin wasn’t trying to ‘rob’ Greece he was attempting to honour and preserve an important physical manifestation of ancient Hellas. His actions speak of the obsession British and German scholars of the nineteenth century had with the Graeco-Roman world. What was it Carlyle said, they were ‘the twin founts of western civilisation, everything we are has that classical inheritance at root.’
It seems clear to me it was a labour of love not looting.
They were most certainly not stolen, John. Elgin paid £75,000 out of his own pocket, a fantastic sum at the time, many millions in today’s terms, to bring the Parthenon marbles to Britain. Now you could make the argument that they weren’t the Ottoman’s to sell, you could easily make a moral case for that, but the reality is that Athens in Elgin’s time had been under Ottoman rule for about four hundred years and there can’t have been too much faith that picture would alter any time soon so Elgin was very much in negotiations with what would have been the relevant authority. Elgin didn’t simply load up two hundred or so crates and ‘leg it’ he had to dig deep.
I went to see Stephen Fry speak last Summer in his role as patron/spokesman for The Parthenon Project which lobbies for the return to Athens of the collection, a move I would fully support. Fry, however, was happy to point out that if not for Elgin it is very unlikely they would exist today. Had they somehow survived Ottoman malice during the War for Independence and Iconoclastic Communist vandalism during the Civil War then they would surely have succumbed to the obscene levels of air pollution in Athens during the ‘70s and ‘80s.
The most obvious reason for The British Museum to have retained them was the fact there was simply nowhere in Athens to house them. That held good down the decades of debate until the construction of the Acropolis Museum. That’s the game-changer. That’s now where they belong.
The weather would have been a factor, for those getting on in years especially, but the temperature is far from the whole story.
I’ve been tracking the downward trajectory of electoral turn-out on here for quite a few years and we’re now at the point where three quarters of eligible voters have turned their back on the process. This surely now has to raise the question of there being a crisis of legitimacy, doesn’t it?
By continuing to use the site, you agree to our use of cookies and to abide by our Terms and Conditions.
