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In the classic film Casablanca, the Frenchwoman Yvonne, one of the regulars of Rick’s Café, joins the other refugees assembled there to sing the Marseillaise, boldly defying the Nazi officers present. She concludes her national anthem with a shouted “Vive la France!”, tears streaming down her face. We now know that the tears were not […]
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Nostalgia has become a defining emotion of twenty-first-century Western culture. From endless film franchise reboots, to the Eras Tour, to the 1980s world of Stranger Things, our media seems perpetually transfixed by the past. Nostalgia—the bittersweet yearning for an absent home—has a remarkable power to enchant us, for good or ill. It can, in the […]
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A lot of ethical programs are predicated on ideas of sameness and reciprocity. These programs urge us to imagine other people as similar to ourselves and to treat them accordingly. This is the essence of the biblical teaching to ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ and is the gist of the so-called Golden Rule: ‘Do unto […]
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“Your cattle are public enemies now,” a state veterinary scientist tells Homer Bannon, an aging cattle rancher in Larry McMurtry’s 1961 novel Horsemen, Pass By, shortly before he compels Homer to drive his livestock into a large pit to be slaughtered and buried. This haunting scene in the novel (and in its film adaptation, Hud) […]
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On Friday 9 June 1458, a pirate ship swerved and fired on two Bristolian trading boats as they passed the coast of Malta, on their return from the Levant. I found the event transcribed in a legal document. I could see the inky vessels with their lost signatures, the Katherine Sturmy and the Marie, trapped […]
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Napoleon Bonaparte: Corsican, illustrious general, First Consul, Emperor of the French, exile, prisoner. It’s quite a CV. He was also a PR expert ahead of his time, and one of his chosen media for this was the theatre. Theatre had the potential to reach thousands of spectators and, when it was reported in the press, […]
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What did it mean to travel in the premodern world – long before passports, maps, or reliable roads? Countless surviving yet often overlooked accounts open a window onto a time when people from Asia, Africa, and Europe journeyed immense distances on foot, by caravan, or across unpredictable seas. Their stories reveal not only the physical […]
Read MoreIn Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Marc Antony famously begins his funeral oration by exclaiming, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” This is an elegant way of asking for attention. At the same time, it engages with important ideas about ears and audition in the early modern period and the degree to which listening might be […]
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