WSJ Historically Speaking: For Feb. 29, Tales of the Calendar Wars

A carved Mayan calendar on textured background. Despite the provisional nature of calendars, two real phenomena govern almost all of them: the phases of the moon and the rotations of the sun. PHOTO: ISTOCK

A carved Mayan calendar on textured background. Despite the provisional nature of calendars, two real phenomena govern almost all of them: the phases of the moon and the rotations of the sun. PHOTO: ISTOCK

Every four years on Feb. 29, we are reminded of one of life’s most puzzling conundrums: Time is both arbitrary and immutable. The “leap” making its appearance this Monday shows that the Western calendar on which we place so much reliance is a conceit—a piece of fiction introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in October 1582.

Despite the provisional nature of calendars, two real phenomena govern almost all of them: the phases of the moon and the rotations of the sun. Our Mesolithic ancestors were the first people to harness the movements of the cosmos to provide a fixed notion of the past, the present and the future. The oldest known calendar in the world was discovered in a Scottish field in 2013, notched into the earth some 10,000 years ago. Our forebears had created it by shaping 12 specially dug pits around a 164-foot arc to mimic the phases of the moon and track the months. Continue reading…

The Sunday Times: Google is strip-mining the world’s culture

Amanda Foreman says the tech giants are making themselves above the law (Max Nash)

Amanda Foreman says the tech giants are making themselves above the law (Max Nash)

Unequal battles are worth fighting when the principles at stake are high enough. That’s the message put out by the small consortium of American plaintiffs who have recently filed a petition with the US Supreme Court.

The suit asks that Google be required to pay for the content it acquires. By “pay” I mean actually pay money, in the way that John Lewis pays suppliers for the products it sells, or Sainsbury’s, or any retail business in the real world. It’s only the online world that sees no difference between stealing and sharing, and believes that being a blood-sucking parasite is a virtuous form of extortion because nobody dies. At least not immediately.

The consortium consists of professional bodies that represent writers, musicians, artists and photographers, the people most vulnerable to loss of copyright control. Google has already won the case in the Court of Appeals, so this is a last-ditch attempt to update for the digital age the laws on the “fair use” of people’s work — meaning how much of a person’s work can be used or reproduced without their permission. Continue reading…

WSJ Historically Speaking: A Valentine to the Bad Boys of Literature

Among the ancient Greeks, the greatest ‘bad boy’ of them all was Zeus. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Among the ancient Greeks, the greatest ‘bad boy’ of them all was Zeus. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

In “Pride and Prejudice” Jane Austen highlighted a truth not universally acknowledged when she made Elizabeth Bennett fall for the dark and brooding Mr. Darcy rather than for a sweet-tempered suitor like her sister Jane’s Mr. Bingley.

Readers just love the bad boys. As Lady Caroline Lamb once said about her lover Lord Byron, it’s the men who are “mad, bad and dangerous to know” who set the heart racing.

Among the ancient Greeks, the greatest “bad boy” of them all was Zeus, who had his wicked way with innumerable nymphs and princesses, though his Olympian brothers were little better. For sheer priapic energy, however, the prize goes to Gilgamesh, god and hero of the Sumerian epic that bears his name. His lust, we’re told, left “no virgin to her lover, neither the warrior’s daughter nor the wife of the noble.” Continue reading…

The Telegraph: Women’s rights were never sacrificed at Stonehenge

The ancient Stonehenge site will be illuminated by a sparkling fire show from Compagnie Carabosse, during the London 2012 Festival

The ancient Stonehenge site will be illuminated by a sparkling fire show from Compagnie Carabosse, during the London 2012 Festival

Nobody really knows why Stonehenge was built, or what it meant to the Neolithic Britons who congregated beneath. But that matters far less than the stupendous findings in Aubrey Hole 7, one of many burial pits around the stone circle.

Thanks to painstaking bone analysis by British archaeologists, it has been confirmed that Stonehenge wasn’t a refuge for fed-up male druids so they could hang out together without being bothered by the ladies. Women were there too – and what’s more, they enjoyed the same status as men. All those children’s history books showing a bunch of hairy men doing man-things around a fire are going to have to redo their artwork.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the news that gender equality existed in Britain as late as the Third Millennium BC. It means that a thousand years after agriculture reached the islands, the sexes were still living and functioning together along egalitarian lines. It means that many of our modern notions about the primacy of men, about women being the second sex, and inequality being intrinsic to the human condition, are just dead wrong. We can move on to other battles. Thank the Lord.

Continue reading…

‘2016 English Ball Honorees’ – St George’s Society of New York

The English Ball

The English Ball

The 2016 English Ball will take place on Wednesday 27th April at the Mandarin Oriental in New York City. At this prestigious event, St. George’s Society will present awards to three distinguished people in the British community in New York: Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief Executive of WPP; Danny Lopez, Her Majesty’s Consul General in New York; and Dr. Amanda Foreman, award-winning historian and 2016 Man Booker Prize Chair.

The English Ball is the most prestigious and important event in St. George’s Society of New York’s calendar with proceeds directly supporting its charitable programs. Starting back in 1770 as a banquet to celebrate St. George, the patron saint of England, it has been held with rare exceptions every year since and is now established as the premier English social event in New York. Continue reading…

Podcast – Intelligence Squared: What Next for Feminism?

Screen Shot 2016-01-29 at 1.09.13 PMAnne-Marie Slaughter is the Washington power player who upset the feminist applecart. At the peak of her career — as first female Director of Policy Planning at the US State Department — she turned her back on her dream job with Hillary Clinton in order to spend more time with her teenage sons. How, cried her contemporaries, could she have sacrificed her high-powered career for her family? Slaughter’s ensuing article for The Atlantic, ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have It All’, went viral, sparking furious debate about how men and women juggle their working lives. Having it all, Slaughter argued, remained a mirage. Women who managed to be both mothers and top professionals were either ‘superhuman, rich or self-employed’.

On January 26, Anne-Marie Slaughter came to the Intelligence Squared stage, together with Amanda Foreman, award-winning historian and presenter of the recent BBC documentary series The Ascent of Woman, which charts the role of women in society over 10,000 years. They were joined by neuroscientist and broadcaster Daniel Glaser and Sky News social affairs editor Afua Hirsch, as they examined what real equality might look like for both men and women. Is gender equality a matter of women ‘leaning in’ harder in their careers? Or do we all need to fundamentally rethink the roles we assign ourselves, so that both sexes can break free from traditional gender stereotypes?

Listen to the podcast of the event here.

WSJ Historically Speaking: The Animals That Save Human Lives

Gen. John Pershing awards Sgt. Stubby with a gold medal in 1921. Stubby served in 17 battles and fought in four major allied offensives during WWI. PHOTO: SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION’S NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Gen. John Pershing awards Sgt. Stubby with a gold medal in 1921. Stubby served in 17 battles and fought in four major allied offensives during WWI. PHOTO: SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION’S NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY

One of the most popular monuments to animal bravery can be found in New York City’s Central Park. A little north of the Children’s Zoo, the statue of a Siberian husky named Balto stands at attention on a granite rock. In February 1925 Balto led the final team of sled dogs that battled through 674 miles of snow and ice to bring diphtheria serum to the stricken children of Nome, Alaska.

The statue is a reminder of the debt of gratitude that we owe not just to the brave dogs that helped to save a town’s children but to all of the animals that have served humankind or given their lives for us.

For most of history, humans blithely ignored that debt. There is, for example, the Homeric story of Odysseus coming home after 20 years to find that no one had bothered to care for his faithful dog, Argos. And in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” we find the lovesick Helena crying to Demetrius, “Use me but as your spaniel—spurn me, strike me, / Neglect me, lose me,” all of which rather aptly sums up the Elizabethan attitude to Man’s Best Friend. Continue reading…

WSJ Historically Speaking: Dreams That Created Literary Masterpieces

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the British writer best known for 'Frankenstein,’ and second wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. PHOTO: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the British writer best known for ‘Frankenstein,’ and second wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. PHOTO: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Dreams have been the stuff of divine inspiration ever since Jacob, in the Book of Genesis, dreamed of a ladder that connected heaven and earth.

In the “Divine Comedy” (completed in 1320), Dante Alighieri wrote of the three dreams that beset him while traveling through Purgatory. In 1678, John Bunyan claimed that “The Pilgrim’s Progress” had come to him while sleeping: “I layed me down in the place to sleep: and as I slept, I dreamed a dream.”

The Romantics, because of their obsession with the sublime, were particularly sensitive to dreaming. The poet William Blake inhabited a twilight of visions and dreams. “O, what land,” he wrote, “is the land of Dreams?” It was a place so real and vivid to him that Blake claimed his method for relief etching—which he used to combine text and color images in “illuminated printing”—was the gift of his late younger brother, Robert, who explained it in a dream. Continue reading…

The Spectator: Amanda Foreman’s diary: My inspiration as a Man Booker prize judge

Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Andrew Walker/Getty Images for CHANEL BeautŽ

Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Andrew Walker/Getty Images for CHANEL BeautŽ

So far my responsibilities as the 2016 chair of the Man Booker prize have been rather light. We’ve had our first meeting, received our first batch of books, and I’ve bought a smart notebook for record-keeping. I shall take a step back from journalism this year, including my Sunday Times column, but that doesn’t mean I shall be less active in the fight for freedom of expression. Some things are non-negotiable.

I’ve just read Open Letter by the late Charlie Hebdo editor Charb. He finished it two days before his death in the massacre on 7 January 2015. The book is aimed at both religious extremists and their apologists. ‘No form of discrimination,’ proclaimed Charb, ‘is better or worse than any other.’ If only the 145 writers who publicly protested against the 2015 PEN America award to Charlie Hebdo could be made to read his book. Perhaps it would shame them out of their smug self-righteousness. There is something disgusting about writers who defend the assassin’s veto. It’s such a perversion of power and victimhood. PEN refused to be intimidated. But it remains to be seen whether other institutions, such as universities, will stay true to their enlightenment values when we have a new generation of politicised purity trolls banging at the gates.

I served on my first literary prize jury almost 20 years ago. Yes, a few of the horror stories about them really are true. Some people take part because they think it will make them look good. Others do it out of a vague sense of duty that doesn’t extend to reading all the books. Then there are the bullies who make each meeting feel like an interrogation session. And let’s not forget the spoilers. Continue reading…