Civilisation
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The peril of ignoring history's lessons needs hardly be stated. But what must be driven home is how precious and vulnerable civilisation is, and how easily it can be destroyed if leaders lack resolve and competence and the people prove unable or unwilling to protect a way of life they have been allowed to take for granted
December 30, 2021
25 mins
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For at least 240 years Western societies have been fascinated […]
July 10, 2021
40 mins
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There is a degree of inevitability about the association of Rome with America, with the implication that the known fate of one might inform the likely fate of the other. Indeed, so close are the two narratives entwined in American culture that this has become a political factor in and of itself
July 10, 2021
7 mins
The latest
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Modernism proclaimed itself ‘anti-civilisation’, characterised by a fanatical rejection of the core values, traditions and conventions that had sustained Western Civilisation for over a millennium. Depressing as that may be, take heart! As Kenneth Clark noted, civilisation has plumbed the abysmal depths before, pulled itself together and recovered
November 15, 2020
31 mins
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Nearly half a millennium separates Michelangelo’s Pieta from Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ. Exquisitely carved from marble, Michelangelo’s masterpiece depicts Christ, recently crucified, lying dead in his mother’s lap. Serrano’s puerile provocation demonstrates, just as Sir Kenneth Clark foresaw, how very far and deep Western values and civilisation have slipped
November 7, 2020
25 mins
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The thirteenth installment of Mervyn Bendle's guide to Sir Kenneth Clark's 'Civilisation' brings us almost to the present day. Have the material achievements of the modern world been matched by comparable advances in culture and society? 'One may be optimistic,' says Clarke, 'but one can’t exactly be joyful at the prospect before us'
October 17, 2020
18 mins
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In the twelth installment of Mervyn Bendle's guide to Sir Kenneth Clark's 'Civilisation', we see faith in mankind's ability to find and embrace freedom, in both its political and personal incarnations, descend into tyranny, genocide and tears. This, as Clark describes it, brought the bitter revelation that hope bestrode the artistic imagination on feet of clay
October 10, 2020
18 mins
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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
October 3, 2020
12 mins
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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
September 26, 2020
14 mins
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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
September 19, 2020
13 mins
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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
September 13, 2020
10 mins
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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
September 5, 2020
11 mins