Those who heard Hill deliver the lectures on which it is based - lectures delivered in a nervous, slightly stuttering voice - will always reserve a special place for his 1972 study of radical and millenarian ideas, The World Turned Upside Down. Not only was this one of the very few history books to be turned into a play (at the National theatre), it was also a work made more exciting by the time in which it was written, an era of counter-cultural energy which Hill observed (and quietly celebrated) from the Balliol master's lodgings.
-Martin Kettle, Obituary for Christopher Hill, The Guardian Wednesday February 26, 2003
We may be too conditioned by the way up the world has been for the last three hundred years to be fair to those in the seventeenth century who saw other possibilities. But we should try.
-Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: radical Ideas During The English Revolution
In our digital/post-analog/post-industrial/post-mechanical age, it's brain power not horsepower that runs and rules the world. There's a reason the richest guys (and they are mainly guys after all) are now Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, the Google Two et al. In honor of this refreshing topsy turvy world turned upside down model of high school culture, TNA notes with great pleasure the fantastic blog by one wit/raconteur/actor/author/general man about town Stephen Fry as well as what should prove to be a most eggs-cellent Saturday blog, Dork Talk on guardian.co.uk.
I'm that wierd blogger who still has a whiff of the Luddite about him. No, I don't have a cellphone and no I don't want one. But someday soon I will have an iPod touch and then it'll be time to think about a USB turntable for conversion of all that crucial vinyl which has never been reissued on CDs.
I'm not the total fetishist Fry is but I have waxed rhapsodic on occasion about the beauty of recent Apple designs. And I've been known to take a digital picture or a hundred and upload them to the Net. Still I'm old enough to favor the purely physical tactile sensation of holding a book rather than some eDownload.
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