Some lives reflect the mission of The Long Now Foundation, a creative thinking foundry that encourages imagination at the timescale of civilisation of the next and last 10,000 years. Individuals so rooted can make a huge impression in the here and now, but reflection enables a longer view of what shaped their past, animates their […]

Glasgow’s Climate Change event – the 26th “Conference of the Parties” that convened earlier this month to advance humanity’s response to the crisis facing our environment – has come and gone. Arising from the occasion, before and after, the consensus reaction boiled down to two key convictions: before, that it would fall significantly short of […]

It’s not often that one of our tweets is a celebration of the contemplative life. Such was the thrust – or let’s say the drift – of a Guardian editorial commenting on an English Heritage promotion of the virtues of silence. “There’s a lot to be said,” it said, “for . . . a peaceful […]

Occasionally two articles come along in the same week, ostensibly about different topics, but each prompting a similar reaction. It happened this past week with the publication a few days ago in The Guardian’s “Long Read” series of an article entitled “Built on the bodies of slaves: how Africa was erased from the history of […]

In the weeks since Cradle of English completed its first “immerzeo” – an Augmented Reality tour of a historic setting in Fleet Street – the reactions that have been the most rewarding have been those responding to the differences between modern life and what transpired “back in the day”. Not just back in the day […]

While the newspaper industry left Fleet Street a generation ago, the area still crackles with vitality, determination, and smart ideas. Two new filters on the Cradle of English website bely any notion that the centuries-old tradition of business innovation here vanished with those journalists. The first, most recently added, reflects one of the many “oldest […]

Two points are emerging strongly from the developing library of content on Cradle of English. As the blogs, podcasts and videos accumulate, a much clearer conviction arises that what went on in Fleet Street going back centuries before the newspapers took off there remains not only relevant but vital to our understanding of life in […]

In a month when the UK parliament has been riven with debate over cutting the country’s foreign aid budget, it might be useful to consider a hypothetical experiment. Imagine that you were a country that “had form” in the hard power stakes and decided, in the language of today’s business schools, that it was time […]

Dr Samuel Johnson provides in his famous Dictionary several definitions of the word “genius” – all of which have weathered the 250 intervening years, but for the casual sexism of their day. Read “person” for man and these reflections hold up well:  a man endowed with superior faculties; mental power or faculties; disposition of nature […]

Excited by a startling feature on the BBC website last week, several newspapers were falling over each other in serving up the same shock horror story, straight out of the broadcasting corporation’s shrink wrapping. St Paul’s Cathedral, one of “our”iconic tourist sites may have to close. Covid killed off tourist revenues, fabric is “rotting”, rainwater […]