Tag: culture

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Battle for hearts, minds, literature, and intellects

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Charlie English explains how the CIA helped Poland’s underground print banned books, as over ten million books that were smuggled across the Iron Curtain. In 1950s Polish émigré Jerzy Gledroye was running out of cash, after launching a literary review in Paris to save Polish literature from the communist onslaught. In France, funding was scarce, and the Polish people stranded there after the Second World War were improvised and many French intellectuals were enamoured with the USSR. Giedroyc went in search of money in America, as the CIA officers who were keen to undermine Soviet Union censorship, offered him $10,000 … Continue reading Battle for hearts, minds, literature, and intellects

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Humanity’s deepest desires, fears and hopes

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MacCulloch notes that for the vast majority of people throughout this history, marriage was a “contract between two men” that is between two fathers. And  that “When church weddings did start appearing, patchily, in the fourth century, the Church did not offer them to all the faithful”. Three categories of marriage emerged: the “Glorious ( imperial elite) , the “middle” ( imperial officers), and the “vile” (everyone else), with the vast majority of unions in the last category having no involvement from the Church at all. He rebukes contemporary Christians for asserting that there is a “Christian understanding of marriage” … Continue reading Humanity’s deepest desires, fears and hopes

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Culture no longer weapon against human morality

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Oliver Roy, a professor at the European University Institute in Florence, says “ Our world is flattened as linguistic diversity is replaced by Basic English, expression by emoticons, culture  by identity-markers”. Roy draws on his long experience in both academia and public life, but with provocativeness  and tackles the issue of the culture wars explaining today’s fractures via the extension of individual political and sexual freedoms from the 1960s. For Roy, traditional political protest from class, region or ethnicity, fashioning an identity premised on repudiation rather than inheritance of shared history or values, illuminating, if home is a place that … Continue reading Culture no longer weapon against human morality

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Anne Nightingale dies aged 83- BBC Radio One’s first female DJ

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Annie Avril Nightingale – 1 April 1940 to 11 Jan 2024 This lady blazed a trail as first female Radio 1 DJ broadcasting pop music to the enthusing masses and also presenting Top of the Pops. She was known to fans as “The Queen of Breaks” – breakfast being her subject of specialist interest. She also broadcast on the famous “Old Grey Whistle Test” and was known as a new contender in the “Husband Substitute” for those used to only male presenters to get listeners up or jolly the listeners on during the day. She said ” I became the … Continue reading Anne Nightingale dies aged 83- BBC Radio One’s first female DJ