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This is the era of the Napoleonic Wars, of the Battle of Waterloo and the Battle of Trafalgar, and the Duke of Wellington and Admiral Nelson. The waltz was a scandalous new dance craze, and stylish women cropped their hair and wore clinging gowns with daring cleavage. Men gambled incessantly, winning and losing vast fortunes [...]
Peter Barnes gained almost instant recognition, from relative obscurity with his play “The Ruling Class” in the late 1960′s. The play came at the height of the 1960s counterculture movement, when the youth of the western world began to openly question the establishment. Barnes’s irreverent portrayal of upper class eccentricity, greed, and deviance fit in [...]
The amorous, exuberant George IV, when still Prince Regent, began building a retreat to suit his own fancy. The result was Brighton Pavilion, perhaps the most exotic extravaganza to survive time’s decay. …. Lying in the very heart of Brighton, close to the seashore but set back from it, is the fantasy of the Brighton [...]
“This new millennium already marked by killings is merely a sign of what Conrad called our miserable ingenuity. How we love to create Devils and Gods and bloody rivers of ways to get their almighty attention. What we turn away from, in both our enemies and ourselves, is the vast continuum of human frailty.” Faith [...]
“Money is the blood of society, Mr. Gurdjieff told us, and one of life’s driving forces. Neutral in itself, neither good nor evil, the power of money permeates our social and personal relationships, openly and in myriad guises, and this makes it an essential subject in our study of ourselves. The aim is to expose [...]
“Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.” ( J.M. Keynes ) An aristocratic disdain permeated the Bloomsbury group. A contempt for the masses as well as the bourgeois. They were the self-styled new cultural vanguard of the nation and if anything, they were clever, exceptionally [...]
In America you’ll get food to eat Won’t have to run through the jungle And scuff up your feet You’ll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day It’s great to be an American…( Randy Newman, Sail Away) Dustin Hicks:I’ll be the first to admit that his story is compelling. He’s a six foot [...]
Zhong Kui was a folk god,a decent honorable chap good for guarding doors and hunting ghosts; a deformed or ugly figure, given to standing fiercely on one leg, known to suck the eyes out of a demon, so popular he gradually worked his way into the formal pantheon…. “The God of Wealth in His Civil Aspect” [...]
This aspect of Keynes — the shrewd investor, the canny player of financial markets — is rather unexpected in light of the man ’ s early life and beliefs. Keynes was an aesthete, his first allegiance to philosophy and the art of living well. At school and university he displayed little interest in worldly matters, and for the [...]
”Formative” is a term that is applied to that stage of life in Mexico and Peru when a stable agriculture had been achieved and enabled villages to exist and populations to grow. This occurred between 1500 and 500 B.C. when technically and socially, the great classic civilizations of the Americas were being forged. Five thousand [...]
