Atomic rhythms
Situations vacant
|
Last Updated: Saturday, 26 April 2008, 00:32 GMT
Date of first transmission: 2008-04-26T01:32:00-00:00 (audio available for approximately 1 week)
Britain, according to a senior judge, is suffering from an epidemic of family breakdown with the potential for producing destructive social anarchy. Which is why some Westminster politicians have been beating a path to Denver, Colorado in the United States, to see how they dealt with social breakdown in the wake of the Columbine School massacre. The Denver answer is early intervention: the community decided that money spent on the early years of childhood, putting the family back together, was money well spent. The alternative, they argue, is more disorder, more wasted taxpayers money and more prisons. Politics UK has been finding out how they do it.
today's Ordinary Reading Assignment - two items
Endangered Species: The Bart and the Bounder's Countryside Year by Michael Daunt and Richard Heygate (Hardcover - Oct 18, 2007)
Product Description
Studies of the English gentleman have tended to focus mainly on the nineteenth century, encouraging the implicit assumption that this influential literary trope has less resonance for twentieth-century literature and culture. Christine Berberich challenges this notion by showing that the English gentleman has proven to be a remarkably adaptable and relevant ideal that continues to influence not only literature but other forms of representation, including the media and advertising industries.Focusing on Siegfried Sassoon, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh and Kazuo Ishiguro, whose presentations of the gentlemanly ideal are analysed in their specific cultural, historical, and sociological contexts, Berberich pays particular attention to the role of nostalgia and its relationship to 'Englishness'. Though 'Englishness' and by extension the English gentleman continue to be linked to depictions of England as the green and pleasant land of imagined bygone days, Berberich counterbalances this perception by showing that the figure of the English gentleman is the medium through which these authors and many of their contemporaries critique the shifting mores of contemporary society.
