Show Notes
Show Notes:
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0:18) Michael’s languages background
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3:41) How Latin operates as a gateway drug for appreciating the general structure of language
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6:50) Why philology is the atomic element of historiography
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8:26) How Michael sent a letter to every federal minister in Canada
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14:48) The dangerous and precarious dynamics of a life in policy
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19:08) Anything the government says or does is technically policy and all policy has both an operational and a political aspect
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20:10) The artefacts of policy work
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25:30) Michael’s connection with Nassim Taleb and an argument for how we should think about multiculturalism in the context of history.
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35:44) How this connection led on to a connection with Tom Holland
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38:11) Expanding our knowledge of history as the route to better understanding of a broader multiculturalism
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39:36) Spengler and how a historian can remain truthful but still say interesting things
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45:28) The vision of the Sassanian empire as the continuation of the Near Eastern tradition of civilisation
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50:34) Michael’s new book In Defence of Civilisation
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58:38) The foundations of civilisation evidenced in old kingdom Egypt: Clarity, Beauty, and Order
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1:05:14) Homer as the preservation of a high culture that was no longer present
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1:15:30) How our subjectivity has triumphed over our sense of a universal humanity
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1:20:54) How relativity, and chaos theory have affected art
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1:23:41) China’s present day attempt to recapture civilisation through a return to Confucianism