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.
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)
John Blacking, University of Chicago Press,
The musical education strategy for the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport and the Department for Education and Skills
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
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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 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
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
Bored of the Booker: prizes, prizes, everywhere
"The rules of the game at The Battle of Ideas makes beating about the bush impossible. When you are given 5 minutes to make your point, you either say something essential, or you reveal that you have nothing really to say. This eliminates 'the unbearable lightness' of speculation that haunts public debate."
Albena Azmanova, social philosopher, political commentator and activist