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Chapter 1.
When we think of what might have been lost on the way to becoming modern, we’re liable to think about mealtimes: how seldom they now take place communally, how rare it is for whole families to gather, how much technology can intrude. In paintings of communal meals that reflect the…
In sexual matters, the world became modern in early April 1953, on a beach in Cannes, when the eighteen year old Brigitte Bardot appeared in front of the world’s press to…
In Book 10 of the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we’re introduced to one of the world’s more curious but telling myths: a Cypriot sculptor called Pygmalion has developed a problem with…
The working assumption of modern societies is that every ‘normal’ person should seek to have children – and should in every way be enabled to do so. Yet wisdom may point…
The useful thing about children is that they don’t let their imaginations get hampered by the more irritating or incidental aspects of reality. They will for example take one look at…
One of the things it’s easiest to forget about children is that they are aliens recently descended from another planet. In the way they look at everything around them, in the…
For much of the modern era, the story of becoming an adult has been told to us as one of psychological liberation: people will notice – as they grow up –…