It is not clear what is achieved by the destructive application of academic firepower to the central tenets of a major world religion but the sheer volume of papers and books suggest scholars of high and no distinction find the lure impossible to resist. Here, a guide to several centuries' worth of fancies, fantasies, fictions and, yes, the odd fact

In the eleventh installment of Mervyn Bendle's guide to Sir Kenneth Clark's 'Civilisation', we watch the fading belief in a transcendent God surplanted by faith in the divinity of Nature. For the first time in 1000 years, Christianity is usurped as the chief creative force in Western civilization

The humanities are in crisis, as readers of Quadrant will […]

In the tenth installment of Mervyn Bendle's guide to Sir Kenneth Clark's 'Civilisation', we catch the distant whisper of polite conversations in the Parisian salons of the early 18th century and the bedlam of Hogarth's anarchic England -- polar opposites but each opening its own road to revolution, bloody and otherwise

While art and literature tended to stagnate in the 18th century, the same can't be said of music. In the ninth installment of Mervyn Bendle's guide to Sir Kenneth Clark's 'Civilisation', Bach, Handel, Haydn, and especially Mozart write the soundtrack for the cultural shift to Romanticism and, ultimately, the implied rejection of civilisation itself

In the latest installment of Mervyn Bendle's guide to Sir Kenneth Clark's landmark series, the focus shifts to religious conflicts that reframed perspectives in a divided Europe, from Catholicism's reverence for tradition and authority to a Protestant embrace of reason and experience as the basis of knowledge

Tourists admire Bernini's masterwork in St Peter's for its awesome grandeur. Seen through the lens of Sir Kenneth Clark's insight, as Mervyn Bendle lays out in this latest installment, the master's work is a deliberate and defiant celebration of those elements of the Roman Church to which the Protestants of the north took such violent exception

The reborn world of Michelangelo and Leonardo darkened when Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg Castle's church and what had flickered for a moment vanished and was gone. In its place, as Sir Kenneth Clark relates in Mervyn Bendle's latest guide to 'Civilisation', it was destruction and the darkness that haunted the souls of Hamlet, Dürer and others

In this fifth installment of Mervyn Bendle's guide to Sir Kenneth Clark's 'Civilisation' we tour 16th century Florence and Papal Rome, noting the convergence of Christianity and antiquity as wrought by the brilliance of Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci