Reading for Battle
Battle Readings is a regularly updated compilation of articles, essays, and opinion pieces relevant to the themes of the Battle of Ideas.
Choose a theme from the listing on the left to narrow your search, or view all readings.
Arts & Culture
The Long View
There is a simple answer to the question ‘what is the value of research in the humanities?’ It is that research in the humanities is the only activity that can establish the meaning of such a question.
Jonathan Bate, AHRC (working draft)
There is a simple answer to the question ‘what is the value of research in the humanities?’ It is that research in the humanities is the only activity that can establish the meaning of such a question.
Jonathan Bate, AHRC (working draft)
Music, Culture and Experience: Selected Papers of John Blacking
One of the most important ethnomusicologists of the century, John Blacking is known for his interest in the relationship of music to biology, psychology, dance and politics. He attempted to document the ways in which music-making expresses the human condition, how it transcends social divisions and how it can be used to improve the quality of human life.
John Blacking, University of Chicago Press,
Music Manifesto website
The musical education strategy for the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport and the Department for Education and Skills
The musical education strategy for the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport and the Department for Education and Skills
Muzak, Background music, and anti-noise
A sound designed to be heard but not listened to is everywhere mediating our relationship with the world
Mike Brown, EST, Issue Four, Summer 1993
A sound designed to be heard but not listened to is everywhere mediating our relationship with the world
Mike Brown, EST, Issue Four, Summer 1993
spiked film reviews
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spiked film reviews
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spiked film reviews
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Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art
True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and mankind in its time--true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society.
Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky, Generation Online, 1938
True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and mankind in its time--true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society.
Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky, Generation Online, 1938
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production. Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken.
Walter Benjamin, Marxists.org, 1936
The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production. Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken.
Walter Benjamin, Marxists.org, 1936
Tradition and the Individual Talent
In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is “traditional” or even “too traditional.”
T.S. Eliot, quotidiana.org, 1920
In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is “traditional” or even “too traditional.”
T.S. Eliot, quotidiana.org, 1920
BoI 2007 Vox Pop 1
"If you have not tried it, you miss the best annual collective thought provoking opportunities in Britain."
Vijaya Madhavan, business consultant and part time doctor
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