Beyond the Tunnel of History
A revised and Expanded Version of the 1989 BBC Reith Lectures
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15 Result(s)
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Highways of Freedom
There is no passport as effective as linguistic ability, no better way to enter the life and culture of others than to speak their language. But I discovered when still very young that an open-minded desire fo...
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Re-Crossing the Somme
The configuration of that part of Northern France from where I come is rather deceptive. It is is an extended plain which runs north of Paris to the Maas Valley at Namur in Belgium, north across to Germany and...
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Home Sweet Home!
I was brought up near the Somme and as a young teenager I attended the Lycée at Abbeville. I was still very much a provincial in those days, almost oblivious of the implications of the global conflict from whi...
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Channel of History
We are on the beach at Calais, not far from the place where the cross-Channel ferries dock today. From the luminosity of the sky it seems we are in mid-summer. The sea is its usual sandy-brown, with just the o...
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Towards the Light
When Irish scholars brought their ‘Philosophy of Light’ to Laon in northern France they also brought with them a knowledge of Greek. Absurd, in a way, that the culture of south-eastern Europe should become the...
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Première Place
I live in Paris just by that vast grassy square, the Champ de Mars, almost in the shadow of the colossal iron structure that dominates it, the Eiffel Tower. And it came as a surprise (not only to me but, I sus...
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Bruegel’s Babels
I was invited to talk on Belgian radio about my book Le Génie du Nord (Genius of the North), an extended essay on the north and ‘northemness’. The interviewer, a young Francophone Belgian poet, asked me tongue-in...
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Travelling Back
Among British travellers making contact again with the Continent after the long interval of the Napoleonic Wars, John Ruskin was perhaps the most influential. His social thinking combined with his aestheticism...
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Out of the Trench
They are soon to open a Museum of the First World War in Picardy. The place chosen for the site lies slightly east of the Somme battlefields, in Péronne. Of course they had to think of the comfort and convenie...
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Rivers of Time
The face of London is changing. The banks of the Thames are being redeveloped. Soon the Globe Theatre will resume its activities as in Shakespeare’s time. One literary age expels another. The London that is pa...
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Beyond Tintern
A decisive moment in European cultural history occurred when Wordsworth fled from the French Revolution that he had at first hailed and returned to his birth-place in the Lake District. In doing so he helped t...
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Introduction
‘The emergence of polyphony was the aesthetic equivalent of the development of democracy.’ Jacques Dar as dropped this remark casually over lunch one day. It was a provocative comment, of course, doubtless ove...
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Beyond the Tunnel of History
The Bicentenary came and went. The various commemorations changed nothing. But how could it have been otherwise? Though it may have helped disseminate revolution all over the world, the French Revolution retai...
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In Pursuit of the Golden Fleece
With all the digging up of data that went on in connection with the Bicentenary of the French Revolution, and the earnest quest for new interpretations of its origins and significance, it was easy to lose a se...
