Fascinating piece of restoration highlighted by Architecture Week 2004 | June 18 – June 27 Organised and Managed by Arts Council England Long before upstart trader Nick Leeson put the boot into Barings Bank by secretly running up more than $1bn of liabilities, financial difficulties had scuttled one of the key assets of the bank’s…
heritage
counterfactuals and fakes
– the implications of the question “what if … ?” The ancient historians Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel are two colleagues of mine at Stanford. “Who killed Harry Field?” Ian sees himself as a social scientist of the ancient world – building models of how antiquity worked, models that are general enough to apply beyond…
nostalgia – memory, and a sense of who we are
Fabulous piece of writing from Gordon Burn today in the Guardian about a particular, and very familiar, relationship with the past – The ‘English disease’ See also Gordon Burn in my blog entry on murder, the domestic and the uncanny – [Link] So good I have to quote quite a bit … Bob Dylan hated…
conservative heritage – the Yes Men version
A new take on our Classical heritage from The Yes Men.
memory, heritage, things and a sense of who we are
BBC magazine article today on the nostalgia business – it is big and growing. BMW’s new Mini – after the 60s icon – is very popular here in northern California. Raleigh’s 1970s “chopper” bicycle was relaunched last month. Now some people have a problem with all this – because they see nostalgia as some kind…
Issues of cultural property – the usual tensions
Two articles this weekend about the Parthenon marbles. The Guardian reports a video making a case for the return of the marbles sent to 1000 members of Parliament in the UK. The New York Times yesterday ran an article about the guilt instilled by a new museum on the slopes of the Acropolis in Athens,…