Forget History

February 3, 2016

At the end of John Sayles’ masterful film Lone Star, the two main protagonists have just discovered that their life-long love is doomed as they are brother and sister. They sit in a disused drive-in, an outdoor cinema, and contemplate how the vagueries of personal and...

Reason: A Goddess with Feet of Clay

December 30, 2015

In the wake of the French revolution in the 1790s emerged a new religion, the Cult of Reason. This new faith was dedicated to the de-Christianizination of Europe and in churches all over France a new goddess was enthroned. Sensibly the new high-priests shied away from...

Lost for Words? You’re not the only one.

November 30, 2015

The seminal 1970s concept album Tales of Mystery and Imagination by the Alan Parsons Project begins with the recorded voice of the legendary Orson Welles. In his inimitable voice Welles reads out an extract from Edgar Alan Poe’s Marginalia (1844 – 1849) in which the...

Was Plato Right?

November 11, 2015

Plato’s definition of what knowledge is, ‘justified true belief’, has been trotted out by countless IB students for generations, often without much thought as to its genuine value or validity as a definition of what knowledge is. However, what are we to make of the...

Two Cultures?

October 7, 2015

Do you think of yourself naturally as an artist or a scientist? Do you instinctively lean towards culture or technology? Are you predominantly left or right brained? Do you struggle with families of subjects which seem to belong either to the Humanities or the...

What’s the Story?

August 28, 2015

Human beings see the world in stories. Whatever we put our minds to is naturally furnished with a narrative which gives our thinking a context – it seems to be built into our DNA. Whilst we are all familiar with some of the ancient stories our ancestors created...