United Kingdom

Please see selected recent isolation-related change below.

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April 2019

• For The School of Life, our sense of isolation is never greater than when we run into the armies, widely distributed through society, of the closed-minded. Full of broadly benevolent intention, these types nevertheless keep a close eye on any signs of the more regrettable aspects of human nature and are ready to censor their appearance from the first. We learn to recognise their disapproval and to keep our shadow sides especially private in their vicinity – which protects our reputations, but increases our underlying sense of freakish isolation.

March 2019

Please see below selected recent language-related change.

See also: Halcyon Language Headlines

March 2019

Please see below selected recent culture-related change.

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• Halcyon Culture Headlines
• What's Changing? - Culture: Arts
• What's Changing? - Culture: Design
• What's Changing? - Culture: Education
• What's Changing? - Culture: Humanism
• What's Changing? - Culture: Ideas
• What's Changing? - Culture: Religion

February 2018

According to Open Culture, Orwell's Animal Farm was almost never published.  The manuscript barely survived the Nazi bombing of London during World War II, and then initially T.S. Eliot (an important editor at Faber & Faber) and other publishers rejected the book.  It eventually came to see the light of day but, reportedly, Animal Farm still can’t be legally read in China, Burma and North Korea, or across large parts of the Islamic world. 

However, the Internet Archive offers free access to audio versions of Animal Farm and Orwell’s other major classic, 1984.

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God‏ @TheTweetOfGod 8h8 hours ago

90% of My time is spent adversely affecting the fortunes of your favourite team.

I have listened to and would recommend the following podcasts (2015-2018 recommendations to follow):

2014

T.S. Eliot died over 50 years ago now. His legacy remains profound and his poetry moves me deeply.

In 2016 I had the privilege of visiting his final resting place, East Coker.

I read or listen to the peerless Little Gidding at least once a quarter, sometimes more often, and almost every line entrances, as if peering through a veil at something once known, but half-forgotten because not looked-for.

In the 1840s Henry David Thoreau swapped his busy schedule in Concord, Massachusetts, for a wooden hut he built himself near Walden Pond. We had the privilege to visit Walden in July 2012; it exceeded expectations in its tranquility and beauty - and the swim in the pond itself was unforgettable.

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Where did everything come from? Where are we heading? Big History tells the story of the Universe starting from the Big Bang, the formation of stars, planets, life on Earth, modern civilisation — and what might exist in the future.

Asking which shifts, in which centuries, really shaped the modern world. a historian identified 10 leading drivers of change, century by century 

Meanwhile, Prospect believes that reflecting on the past can give great in sight into the present and has published accordingly The past in perspective e-book.

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• Free Online History Courses: From Ancient Greece to The Modern World

Would you travel across the land, in the hour of the summer solstice? 

- from Ancient Dream, by Aeolian Songspell

A time for the half-remembered inner pagan to re-emerge, dancing widdershins in the pre-dawn dew around the celebrity stones, or the authentic stones, or wherever one finds oneself this solstice-time. 

The veil is thin now...

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