en-uk Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:37:29 GMT Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd. custserv@timesonline.co.uk http://www.timesonline.co.uk Sat, 21 Nov 2009 04:34:10 GMT Newspapers 144 21 http://www.timesonline.co.uk http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,116979,00.gif Seamus Heaney Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:38:22 GMT 2009-11-19T03:30:21Z i Christopher Coker Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:59:29 GMT 2009-11-19T03:03:35Z It was only while serving in an army barracks in Bangalore that the young Winston Churchill began reading books. At the comparatively late age of twenty-two he tells us in My Early Life, the desire for learning came upon him. He had always liked history at school and decided to begin with Gibbon; from there he went on to Macaulay. He already knew by heart (as so many children of his generation did) the Lays of Ancient Rome. He progressed to philosophy, beginning with Plato’s Republic and ending with Schopenhauer and Darwin’s Origin of Species. For Churchill, this was a preparation for life. He learned, for example, for the first time, that “ethics” did not mean “playing the game”, or esprit de corps; he learned that it concerned not just knowing the things you ought to know, but also the way you ought to do them. His greatest discovery was the “Socratic method” which was “apparently a way of giving your friend his head in an argument and progging him into a pit by cunning questions”. Matthew Cobb Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:58:01 GMT 2009-11-19T03:36:10Z In the spring of 1943, shortly before the Nazis captured and murdered Jean Moulin, the highest circles of the French Resistance were profoundly split by allegations of treason and double-dealing. The incident had nothing to do with the Nazis: Moulin accused Henri Frenay’s Resistance movement, Combat, of setting up a cash-for-intelligence deal with the Americans. The implication, said Moulin, was that Frenay had shifted his support from General de Gaulle to Henri Giraud, the hapless and malleable general whom the United States had put in charge of French North Africa in the vain hope that he would replace the querulous de Gaulle as leader of the Free French. Moulin described the deal as a “betrayal”, while Frenay accused Moulin of being guilty of a “crime” against the Resistance because he blocked the deals; in the tense and dangerous world of Occupied France, these allegations could have had terrible consequences. Guy Dammann Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:49:40 GMT 2009-11-18T02:49:40Z Although music has always stood comparison with the other arts, its oddness is something we rediscover each time we try to describe it. When we speak of interpreting works of art, for example, we refer to the practice of deciphering their single or several meanings. But to interpret music, in the classical tradition at least, has come to refer simply to playing it; that is to executing a set of more or less clear instructions left by the composer. Similarly, in eighteenth-century France, when the concept of mimesis harboured the images of excellence in all the arts, and no one troubled to discuss the arts without discussing their success in imitating "la belle nature", the sole entry on musical imitation listed in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie discussed only the purely technical matter of one part imitating another in polyphonic music.