Tag: Romanticism
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The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, and Logicomix
Comics again, this time with a couple of wonderful graphic novels that tackle similar mathematical themes but in very different ways. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou focuses on Bertrand Russell’s attempt to create a mathematical foundation for logical truth, while Sydney Padua’s The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace […]
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The Company of Wolves (1984)
Wandering through Kate Bush’s imagination a couple of weeks ago made me think of a peculiarly English brand of dark fantasy that started in the late Victorian era with writers like George MacDonald and Lucy Clifford. These and others managed to write children’s stories possessed of such toe-curling nightmarish terror that they continue to haunt […]
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The King of Elfland’s Daughter – 1977
For years the TV program Top of the Pops and the Sunday Top 40 on Radio One had a stranglehold on popular music in the UK. Bands sank or swam depending on where they were in the charts and how much exposure they got on the BBC on a Thursday evening. Rankings depended entirely on singles […]
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Classrooms of the Future
I work in education, advising ministries throughout the world on how to best use technology in the classroom. For most the process is one of constant catch up. Technology changes on a monthly basis, while education systems tend to work on yearly budget cycles. Furthermore if you tinker with something you usually don’t see the […]
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The Japanese Wuthering Heights – Arashi ga Oka (1988)
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a really odd book. On the surface it’s the first bodice-ripper – a passionate tale of doomed love set among the Yorkshire Moors. Yet our ideas about the story, and the tragic duo of Cathy and Heathcliff, often come from the myths that that have built up around the novel, […]
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John Martin – Catastrophic Artist
A belated Happy New Year to everyone. This post is a bit later than I anticipated because I’ve spent the weeks after Xmas finishing the second draft of Thumb. It’s now been put into a drawer for a month to ferment before I give it another going over and then send it to my editor. […]