· By Tam McDonald
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…
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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…
Read more →· By Tam McDonald
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…
Read more →· By Tam McDonald
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…
Read more →· By Tam McDonald
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…
Read more →· By Tam McDonald
An article in The Guardian last week asks “If we really have passed ‘peak London’, what does that mean for Britain?” The sub-heading concedes that the capital may have fallen on hard times but, as if this were a compelling counter-argument, “. . . it still offers a defiantly…
Read more →· By Tam McDonald
Recent flareups over issues of “cultural identity” have brought into sharper relief the question of what it means to be English. Related to this: what does it mean to speak English? Populist purveyors of ill-intentioned identity politics rush to demand that we consider what they…
Read more →· By Tam McDonald
We have been pleased to launch a new format of podcast earlier this month, entitled the Devil Dialogues. They are inspired by the dedication to wit and good conversation as stipulated in the rules laid down by Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson. A contemporary of Shakespeare’s, he…
Read more →· By Tam McDonald
If as a thought experiment we accepted the generally proffered age of humanity as 200,000 and the average age of generational turnover over the centuries as working out around 20, then arithmetic suggests that we can work our way up either parental line through 10,000 grannies to…
Read more →· By Tam McDonald
Two weeks ago, this blog posed a question about what museums could be for, responding to a book review in The Financial Times that surveyed the landscape of museums across the world. It took as a given that whatever else will define the museum of the future, it will be a building…
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