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.
Maurice Cowling, Cambridge University Press , 18 January 1963
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.
George Orwell, Horizon, 1 April 1946
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
A study of democracy in Ancient Greece, its meaning today
C. L. R. James, Correspondence, 18 January 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
'The life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it.'
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Loeb Classical Library, 1932
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
Advertisements are sometimes spoken of as the nervous system of the business world ... As our nervous system is constructed to give us all the possible sensations from objects, so the advertisenent which is comparable to the nervous system must awaken in the reader as many different kinds of images as the object itself can excite
Walter D. Scott, The Atlantic, January 1904
Research for the sake of it?
"I have been doing the Battle of Ideas for a couple of years, but never before have I felt so heartened and so alive as the day ended. The spectacle of so many fascinating minds, none too proud to agree, none too modern to disagree, all at work on the most important questions of this rocky period: it's enough to make you believe there's hope for the species, yet."
Zoe Williams, columnist, Guardian; author, What Not to Expect When You're Expecting
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