On May 28th 1453, when the Byzantine emperor Constantine XI entered the “Church of the Divine Wisdom”, Constantinople was under siege. Perhaps the emperor knelt to pray before the Apse Mosaic of the Virgin and Child. Looking up at the gloriously gilded icon of one of Christianity’s most famous images – a young mother sitting on a throne holding a child upon her lap; the saviour of mankind.
Mao was deeply Marxist in his convictions but he heavily sinified Marx’s theory, applying it to the Chinese situation and adapting it from a European context. Born out of the Marxist theory of scientific inquiry called dialectical materialism, Mao ‘sinified’ his own political actions according to this framework.
There are few bigger questions than that of the meaning of life. Why do we exist, possess aspiration, and abide by certain ethics? For centuries, the answers to these questions have been provided by something many now regard as simplistic and irrational: religion
First wave feminism, which was and is viewed as pivotal in the fight for women’s rights by giving around 8.4 million women the vote, only claimed the vote for two in every five women in the UK; similarly in the US, the Nineteenth Amendment of 1920 brought the vote for only white women. First wave feminism therefore largely ignored social cross-sections by focusing almost exclusively on middle class white women.
Mary Wollenscraft is one of the most famous people you’ve never heard of. Her presence in the school curriculum is minimal; her only appearance comes as a contextual note for ‘Frankenstein’ – the popular book written by Mary Shelley, her daughter
