celiagreen.blogspot.com
CELIA GREEN: November 2014
http://celiagreen.blogspot.com/2014_11_01_archive.html
Maria Casares (1922-1996),. Star of Cocteau’s Orphée. We lost touch completely a few years after I left college, and I have never heard from Jane since. I was thinking of her recently, and looked her up on Google, via which I learnt that she had donated money to Somerville College recently, in 2010-11. (The Somerville College Report for Donors of that financial period does not say how much any of the donors contributed.). One might have expected that college friends would be sympathetic to the needs of t...
celiagreen.blogspot.com
CELIA GREEN: March 2015
http://celiagreen.blogspot.com/2015_03_01_archive.html
Aldous Huxley, prophet of totalitarianism. Aldous Huxley was an English novelist who is probably now best remembered for the science fiction work Brave New World. One of the first books to use the concept of totalitarianism, and predating Orwell’s 1984. By more than a decade. A book that influenced a number of writers and artists. Huxley treated me very politely, putting on a highly sophisticated act of Old Etonian charm. While I knew that such charm could be layered (i.e. potentially dishone...About his...
celiagreen.blogspot.com
CELIA GREEN: Why I cannot write long books
http://celiagreen.blogspot.com/2015/02/why-i-cannot-write-long-books.html
Why I cannot write long books. Sir George Joy KBE CMG. Professor H.H. Price, my DPhil supervisor, when saying that I had an alpha mind, also said that I could say more in one page than most people would say in three. In this context he recognised the brevity of my writing as indicating the high quality of my thinking; but this brevity was generally a drawback, which made fulfilling academic requirements even more burdensome than it would otherwise have been. My book The Human Evasion. When people started...
celiagreen.blogspot.com
CELIA GREEN: December 2014
http://celiagreen.blogspot.com/2014_12_01_archive.html
Professor H.H. Price. Copy of a letter to an academic. I have been thinking about Professor H.H. Price’s role in my attempts to return to academia. These are preliminary notes. Professor Price was unusually open to my ideas about the existential uncertainty. Nobody else at the Society for Psychical Research had taken any interest in Alexandra David-Neel, for example. His awareness of my ability did not seem, as it so often did, to arouse hostility, which would sometimes express itself violently. I knew t...
celiagreen.blogspot.com
CELIA GREEN: August 2014
http://celiagreen.blogspot.com/2014_08_01_archive.html
Educational ideology and the loss of clarity. One of my colleagues has a book that was given as a school prize in a State primary school 50 years ago, and which shows how the dominant ideology has developed since then. The book is entitled The Living World of History. Then again, the goodness and rightness of socialism, as opposed to capitalism, is also questionable. People who are thinking of coming to form an association with us should be aware of the concept of ‘interns’. People starting their careers...
celiagreen.blogspot.com
CELIA GREEN: State pension: still below the poverty line
http://celiagreen.blogspot.com/2015/04/state-pension-still-below-poverty-line.html
State pension: still below the poverty line. I am re-posting this piece from 2011 as, despite any changes in the system since it was first published, the comments are as relevant as before. From time to time someone complains that the state pension, together with the means-tested part, is becoming less and less adequate to cover the most obvious, basic costs of keeping physically alive. 30 March 2011.). Throughout the four decades when I paid in voluntary contributions for myself, and encouraged everyone...
celiagreen.blogspot.com
CELIA GREEN: Aldous Huxley, prophet of totalitarianism
http://celiagreen.blogspot.com/2015/03/prophet-of-totalitarianism.html
Aldous Huxley, prophet of totalitarianism. Aldous Huxley was an English novelist who is probably now best remembered for the science fiction work Brave New World. One of the first books to use the concept of totalitarianism, and predating Orwell’s 1984. By more than a decade. A book that influenced a number of writers and artists. Huxley treated me very politely, putting on a highly sophisticated act of Old Etonian charm. While I knew that such charm could be layered (i.e. potentially dishone...About his...
celiagreen.blogspot.com
CELIA GREEN: W. Grey Walter and my DPhil thesis
http://celiagreen.blogspot.com/2015/01/w-grey-walter-and-my-dphil-thesis.html
W Grey Walter and my DPhil thesis. Copy of a letter to an academic. The Perrott Studentship with which I returned to Oxford in an ostensibly normal way, much to Dame Janet Vaughan’s chagrin, has reminded me how extreme was the misrepresentation of the situation with regard to experimental work and my thesis. I hope to write about this in more detail later, but there was no doubt in my mind that I was aiming at doing experimental work all the time I was working on my postgraduate degree. W Grey Walter was...
celiagreen.blogspot.com
CELIA GREEN: Jesus on feminism
http://celiagreen.blogspot.com/2015/05/jesus-on-feminism_1.html
Copy of a letter to a philosopher. Someone recently suggested that I am more cynical about society than any other writer in recent history. Even Schopenhauer only observes that people are sadistic in certain ways, and in certain situations. But it appears that some two thousand years ago, somebody may have been comparably cynical about society, and open to the possibility that it is antagonistic to the individual. In the gnostic Gospel of Thomas. There are other sayings in The Gospel of Thomas. It appear...
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