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23 Jun 2024: Genealogy is all the rage. The TV series "Who Do You Think You Are?" indulges the curiosity of celebrities about their roots and is a big hit.

23 Jun 2024: 279/892) who authored the famous Futūḥ al-Buldān (Book of Conquests) and Ansāb al-Ashrāf (Genealogies of the Nobles).1 Another two important reference pieces are al-Zubayrī and Ibn

23 Jun 2024: The organisers and panellists (Credit: Will Ryle-Hodgers). Tying some of these broad themes together was historian Yossef Rapoport's keynote address, titled 'Tribalisation, Conversion and Tribal Genealogy as a 'Language ... His argument, that Coptic

23 Jun 2024: What does mainstream religion make of the Kama Sutra? To read the KAMA SUTRA or the SONG OF SONGS you might feel religion is obsessed with sex. Yet so often the discussion of sex has been a problem in Churches, Temples, Synagogues and Mosques. The

23 Jun 2024: Critics often observe that he wrote histories of mentalities, what they mean is that Auerbach drafted an intellectual history of our present, of the modern subject – a genealogy of the mental

23 Jun 2024: Hatred is a powerful human emotion. It can motivate individuals and nations, sometimes with tragic consequences. Hatred is something most people feel some of the time but how should it be controlled? Certainly not by giving free rein to social media

23 Jun 2024: There’s a pizza joint in Washington DC where a cabal of satanic child abusers meets to brag about their exploits. There’s a pizza joint in Washington DC where a cabal of satanic child abusers meets to brag about their exploits. During his

23 Jun 2024: Africa.'. [4] See, for example Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Fontana Press, 1993); Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, Discipline and Reason of Power in Christianity and Islam (London and

23 Jun 2024: Irish writer Rose Doyle talks to Ed Kessler about her son’s suicide. Suicide is more common than we might think: no one is immune from suicidal thoughts and there are more than 5,000 actual deaths by suicide in the UK each year. Rose Doyle tells

23 Jun 2024: Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics

23 Jun 2024: Is diaspora community just a posh phrase for immigrant community? Diasporas are often born of misfortune, the experience of homelands left willingly because of lack of opportunity, or fled because of war. In the age after Empire, many subject

23 Jun 2024: A light- hearted discussion about positive thinking in bad times. Can positive thinking create its own momentum, or to put it another way, does negativity reap its own bad harvest? Esther-Miriam Wagner and Robert Tombs read the runes. Woolf

23 Jun 2024: Genocides, and why we as a species are capable of such things. The twentieth century was littered with genocides. Those in Armenia, Nazi Germany, Rwanda and Bosnia are the most notorious … Meryem Kalayci and James Smith discuss this most

23 Jun 2024: Many families in the UK open their homes to provide refuge for fleeing Ukrainians. What is the history and the future of sanctuary? The idea of sanctuary for the oppressed individual or for groups of people fleeing persecution or war is an ancient

23 Jun 2024: Immortality is a fantasy so we better get real about death and dying. How should we prepare for death? How can we cope when those we love die? Medical advances mean life can be prolonged as never before but is this the right way to go? Joining Ed

23 Jun 2024: What makes for good collaborative thinking? "Group think" implies lazy, complacent decision making. But what about group thinking? That could imply collaboration, people getting together and coming up with a collective idea that’s better than the

23 Jun 2024: Whose genes are they anyway?

23 Jun 2024: Are we reaching a tipping point in our attitudes towards racial inequality? When George Floyd’s brutal killing was captured on video, Black Lives Matter protests quickly spread across the world. In England, the statue of the 17th century slave

23 Jun 2024: What does it mean to be free? When the Berlin Wall came down in 1991, the writer Alan Bennet quipped mordantly about ‘the freedom to shop’. Of course there was much more to it than that. Esther-Miriam Wagner and Alexander Massmann join Ed

23 Jun 2024: Could space be where the next arms race plays out? The night sky has been a source of wonder for humanity. We may still look at the stars with awe but we also think of space as a potential military asset. And we are filling it with junk. Gerry