Some of the PowerPoint presentations made at the Bristol Forum are now available here by clicking on the links below. The files are all PDFs.
Alexandra Jones: The Challenges Facing Local Government (1.25MB)
Richard Hambleton: What is Local Government For? (1.18MB)
Bethan Evans: The Opportunities for Local Government in a New Era (283KB)
Marie Snelling: Triborough Working: From Experiment to Way of Life (384KB)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb comes to the Festival of Ideas on 31 May to talk about his book Antifragile.
Taleb spoke at a Penguin 5 x 15 event in November 2012 which you can view on YouTube.
Here are links to reviews of the book:
Robert Herritt in the Daily Beast
More than anything else, the book’s sheer scope, as well as its capacity to move with great confidence between the macro and micro while attempting to uncover seemingly universal principles harks back to the writings of classical antiquity. This is a conscious choice by Taleb, who regularly evokes the ancients, and who suggests throughout that he is taking his cue more from the likes of Seneca and Aristotle than any regular of the Aspen Ideas Festival.
We have uploaded to SoundCloud five-minute interviews by Romesh Vaitilingam with Anat Admati and Geoff Mulgan during their recent visits to the Festival of Ideas.
In a book that revolutionised the understanding of English social history, E P Thompson shows how the English working class emerged through the degradations of the industrial revolution to create a culture and political consciousness of enormous vitality. Covering the period 1780 to 1832 it is a classic account of artisan and working-class society in its formative years. It was written while Thompson was working at the University of Leeds.
Pynchon’s first novel integrates two story-lines: one describes the picaresque adventures of discharged US Navy sailor, Benny Profane, and his group of pseudo-bohemian beatnik artists and hangers-on; while the other narrates the quest of an aging traveller named Herbert Stencil to identify and locate the mysterious women he knows only as ‘V’ who he believes to be connected in some way to the twentieth-century’s apocalyptic meaning. The ‘Stencil’ chapters show that V has been involved in key moments of crisis since the closing years of the nineteenth-century including the Fashoda uprising in Egypt, the Venezuelan revolt, the colonial uprising in South West Africa and the rise of Italian fascism.
The Bell Jar, inspired by Sylvia’s Plath’s own experiences as a 20-year old, tells the story of college-student Esther Greenwood’s journey back to reality from her remorseless mental illness. The talented Esther wants to be a writer above all else, but struggles with problems of morality, behaviour and identity. The book chronicles her disappointments, anger, depression and eventual breakdown and treatment.
Mary McCarthy’s best-selling novel follows eight graduates from exclusive Vassar College as they find love and heartbreak, forge careers, gossip and party in 1930s Manhattan and into the Second World War. It was one of the first novels to frankly portray women’s real lives, exploring subjects such as sex, contraception, motherhood and marriage.
This book chronicles Primo Levi’s ten-month odyssey from Auschwitz to his home in Italy. Levi was one of 800 critically-ill prisoners left behind in the camp’s sickbay by the rapidly retreating Germans. Liberated by the Red Army, and returned home by rail by way of the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Romania, the survivors feared that this ‘truce’ was only a dream and rather, than being led to safety and shelter, they would suffer further ordeals and horror.
Martin Luther King’s open letter was written during his imprisonment in Birmingham, Alabama in April 1963 for his involvement in a non-violent protest against racial segregation in the city. It was addressed to eight white Alabaman clergymen who had criticised King for taking to the streets rather than the courts in the fight against racism. The letter was composed at a critical turning point in the mid-century struggle by the black community to overcome oppressive institutional and cultural practices.
In this classic summation of half a lifetime spent playing, watching and writing about cricket, C L R James recounts the story of his overriding passion and of the players whom he knew and loved, exploring the game’s psychology and aesthetics, and the issues of class, race and politics that surround it. Part memoir of a Caribbean boyhood, part passionate celebration and defence of cricket as an art form, part indictment of racism and colonialism, Beyond a Boundary addresses not just a sport but a whole culture.
Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking and life-changing The Feminine Mystique began as a survey that Friedan conducted in 1957 for the 15th reunion of her graduating class at Smith. The survey was later extended to graduates of Radcliffe and other colleges.
This dystopian novel starts in an unspecified point in time. A couple enjoying a leisure trip through space pick up a drifting object. It is a bottle that contains the pages of a manuscript written by Ulysse Merou, a journalist, who had set off from Earth for the nearest solar system in a spaceship that could travel at the speed of light. He writes how he and his companions reached a planet, Soror, which resembled their own, but where humans behaved like animals, and were hunted by a civilised race of primates. Captured and sent to a research facility, Ulysse tried to convince the apes of their mutual origins. Escaping and returning to Earth 700 years in the future, Ulysse discovered that it was now the ‘Planet of the Apes’. The couple who have read his manuscript decide it must be a joke. They are chimpanzees.
Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and controversial report on the 14-week trial in Jerusalem in 1961 of Otto Adolf Eichmann (one of the major architects of the Final Solution) first appeared as a series of articles in the New Yorker. After the war, Eichmann had fled to Argentina where he was employed by Mercedes-Benz, living under an assumed name. He was captured by Mossad operatives in 1960 and brought to trial in an Israeli court on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity. He was found guilty and executed by hanging in 1962.
As part of the 2013 Festival of Ideas programme we are looking back 50 years to some of the books that were published in 1963 and asking which of these has had the most lasting impact. The shortlisted titles are:
Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Pierre Boulle – Planet of the Apes (La planète des singes)
Betty Friedan - The Feminine Mystique
Martin Luther King – Letter from Birmingham Jail
Primo Levi – The Truce (La tregua)(US translation: The Reawakening)
EP Thompson – The Making of the English Working Class
We’ll be posting background material about each of these over the next few days. The Best Book of Ideas 1963 will be announced later in the year.
George Saunders comes to the Festival of Ideas on 30 May to talk about his latest short story collection Tenth of December.
Read interviews with Saunders in the Huffington Post, New Yorker and LA Times (includes video).
Watch an interview for PBS on YouTube.
Here are links to reviews of the book.
Hari Kunru in the Guardian
…George Saunders’s flamboyant satires of American life have become a major influence on a generation of younger short story writers, both in the US and internationally. His new collection, Tenth of December, is funny, poignant – in flashes, deeply moving – light as a feather, and consistently weird in the way that the suburbs are weird, which is to say quietly but intensely, under a surface as clean and bright as a newly waxed car.
