Michael Wood on Prometheus

The moral of Prometheus is that the quest for knowledge beyond reasonable, practical limits is like a form of sexual recklessness. You won't get a disease but you will, man or woman, become pregnant with your own destruction.

The Marquise de Sevigne

"There are three important things in life. The first is to eat well, and - I have forgotten the others."

Ferdinand Mount asks if Britain is turning into an oligarchy. David Runciman replies.

A better guide to the current state of British oligarchy is the Leveson inquiry. It hasn't revealed corruption and avarice on anything but a mundane scale; few outright monsters have emerged; there is as yet no smoking gun.  What it has revealed is the complacency, passivity and reckless negligence of those who thought they were doing nothing wrong. Th econgestion of British public life, its squeezed, banal, thoughtless, easy way with power, its acquiescence in its own straitened quality; its thin conception of the public good, its sense of comfort with its own limited ambitions have all been on daily display.  It's nothing dramatic.....Ministers don't do anything nefarious. They simply don't know what's being done in their departments and they don't have any real incentive to find out. Murdoch doesn't know what's going on in his company either, and he too has no incentive to find out.  Confusion and inattention are all our kind of oligarchy needs.