Why bother? Why would you even try to adapt Jane Eyre into a dramatic production? The novel is an almost perfect period piece preserving the architecture of a specific moment in English prose, whose effect largely depends on the possibilities of the first person narrator’s voice and the unimaginable ugliness of its two central characters. You may as well adapt it into a milkshake.But still directors try, drawn in by the sheer gravitational force of the plot and the protagonists. You can see their point, on a basic level: the core of Jane Eyre is powerfully theatrical. For those who have not read the book, here is a brief, teasing summary: a young, orphaned governess is engaged to look after a French child at a sulking hall somewhere in the north Midlands. She is “plain”, a typically rubescent Victorian euphemism for “ugly”. So, fortunately, is the master of Thornfield Hall, Edward Rochester, “more remarkable for character than beauty”. They get along famously, exce ...

- “Do you not realise that you too could create all these things in a sense?" - “And what sense is that?” he said. - “It’s not difficult,” I said. “You could do it anywhere you like and as quickly as you like – quickest, I suppose, if you took a looking-glass and held it up all around you. You could make the sun in an instant, and everything in the sky; the earth in an instant, yourself in an instant, and all the other animals and tools and plants and all the other things we were just talking about.” - “Oh, sure,” he said, “as they appear – but not as they really are.” Plato, Republic X 596d-e The best insults come back as banners. “Tory” originally meant outlaw or rebel – coined from the Irish word for “pursue” – until it became a badge of honour for the Royalist faction in Parliament under Charles II. The “Impressionist” movement took its name from a sneer by the art critic and satirist Louis Leroy, who lambasted Monet’s Impre ...

The DRC made the headlines at the end of last year for electoral malpractice and violence and was treated with weary cynicism by the majority of newspapers. Joseph Kabila had as predicted been returned to the presidency, a position he had held since the assassination of his father during the brutal 2nd Congo War (1998-2003). Kabila had been faced by a divided opposition, hamstrung by internal divisions and tenuously lead by Etienne Tshisekedi. Yet this was an election which, rather than providing closure, through open the question of legitimacy in the Congo. Tshisekedi rejected the result and declared himself President, calling for mass strikes which have yet to materialise. The election posed multiple questions for Congo and by extension central Africa as a whole. How corrupt were the elections but more importantly how have they been perceived by Congelese? The questions all actors in the Congo are asking revolve around whether the elections can be viewed as credible. Evidence o ...

To outsiders the world of the English boarding school can occasionally seem incomprehensibly foreign: the esoteric slang, the strangely archaic routines and the flamboyantly Edwardian dress codes tending to elicit amusement and derision in equal measure. These things can be, and generally are, seen as essentially harmless. They are throwbacks to bygone eras, of interest only to the eccentric antiquarian seduced by these pockets of Victorian idiosyncrasy which Britain has managed to preserve over the years with little but an occasional swipe from an embittered Guardian columnist. The cream of English boarding schools live on in their quirky outdated grandeur across the country, keeping themselves to themselves and their peculiar rituals intact. Scattered across the English countryside, self-sufficient and withdrawn into themselves like monasteries, each one is an island. Even exceptions like Harrow, which has now been swallowed by the relentless march of London’s urban sprawl, stil ...

On the 1st of June, an article appeared on the website Gawker with the intriguing headline ‘The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable’. It is an interesting article, and yes, you still can buy a whole host of illegal products from the site . However, the article’s significance to the world lay not in its exposition of this shady eBay knockoff, but in its explanation of one of the underlying anonymising technologies being employed: Bitcoins. What are Bitcoins? An explanation is offered in this video by its proponents: In other words, Bitcoins are a digital currency, virtual tokens. They were dreamt up in December 2009 by a cryptographer under the probable pseudonym ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ who has now vanished from the scene. Put simply, their value – like the U.S Dollar following its exit from the gold standard – is not ‘backed up’ by any tangible assets, but is instead derived from ‘faith’. By faith, I mean a collective belief that Bitcoins ...

AQA recently announced a scheme to rank all A-level students according to which school they attend, aimed at exposing potential in students from underachieving schools. Or, to put it another way, AQA have today announced a scheme to penalise students from independent schools. Under the system, students from low-performing comprehensives in disadvantaged areas would be entitled to A-level ‘bonus points’ for their school’s ranking, whereas a student from a top performing independent with no students on free school meals would be penalised for the average success of their school. In theory, the scheme sounds promising; a leveling of potential regardless of achievement. In practice attributing bonus points for underperforming schools and penalty points for top ones is fraught with danger. As Professor Alan Smithers from the University of Buckingham has stated, “There must be concerns about the ranking the candidates are awarded. The possibility for errors are enormous.” The ...

“Nobody knows all the wounds of our national tragedy... This trouble will drive us mad” These words of Gomidas in his final moments of lucidity are chillingly prophetic. Perhaps the original tortured artist, his pithy and disarmingly titled songs, such as I Cannot Dance and Oh, What a Delight echo the wry melancholy of The Smiths more than a peasant folk tradition of almost a century earlier. Yet both irony and incongruity were so poignant in the life and works of this Armenian priest and musician - or, to give him his lofty official title, ‘doctor of musicology’.He wrenched the remnants of Armenian peasant culture into the 20th century, painstakingly putting rural folk songs he came across to manuscript paper. His aim was to resurrect the cultural heritage of his homeland. Yet this was not a self-promoting scheme reminiscent of patronising narodniks attempting to incite passion in indifferent Russian serfs. It was an entirely selfless, and ultimately masochistic, task, ...

Indians are a very religious lot. I should know that, as I am one of them. Religion is an integral part of everyday life and influences all the decisions that you make, from your days in the cradle to the time you enter the grave. Charity is an important part of that religious identity and plays a significant role in helping those living below the poverty line. For example, many temples, mosques and gurudwaras offer free food to all that come to their doorstep. I once believed that charity from religious institutions was a more efficient way to help the economically vulnerable than government-run schemes where most of the money was lost to corruption. But recent events in relation to the huge treasure trove found at Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple (Kerala) have presented me with a dilemma. The Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple, founded in the 6th century A.D., has long been a place of worship for the followers of Lord Vishnu. The administration of the temple was taken over by the local king o ...

The things everyone always mentions about Raymond Tallis are these: that he is ludicrously, frighteningly clever, that he is one of the great living polymaths, that Kirsty Young named him as her favourite ever castaway on Desert Island Discs , that even while he was Professor of Geriatric Medicine at Manchester (a position he held for 20 years) and a consultant he would get up at five o’clock to write influential works of philosophy before spending twelve hours at the hospital, that he has written over 20 books on a breathtaking range of subjects, and that he is a lovely chap. The last point is interesting because, on the page, Tallis is something of a pugilist. Back in the early 1990s, his articulate fury at the ‘institutionalised fraud’ of postmodern theory provoked a great deal of abuse in return. More recently, he has opposed the view that humans are nothing more than sophisticated animals. The title of his new book is vintage Tallis – four jabs on the cover alone! It’s ...