Melody

I assume it was before the 2003 invasion; I watched the short YouTube clip and it mentioned how many professionals had left the country since 2003, so it looks as though they're taking that as the time of the before/after divide.

You see this sort of attitude - against women, against any sort of pleasure - in the hard edges of a lot of religions whose mainstream is more tolerant. Thousand-year-old religious texts can be interpreted in many different ways, and there's always been a mindset that if giving up some worldly pleasures in order to please their deity is good, giving up more is even better, and forcing other people to give up theirs is better still (not that dictators necessarily need religion in order to impose their will on the masses, but "this is what God wants" is always a handy rationalisation). Education seems to be one of the ways out of this spiral (at least, that's what happened in the west during the Enlightenment), but an education focussed entirely on religious texts isn't going to help, and that seems to be what's happening these days. IMO the tragedy in this case is that Iraq was moving away from this hard-line religious attitude before the West barged in there with no thought for the long-term consequences of their actions, and now things seem to be getting indistinguishable from other countries in the region that are under the thumb of the Taliban and their ilk. I only hope that the exposure of this school on TV and YouTube doesn't have a tragic outcome, but these days I'm not holding out a lot of hope.

The sad thing is that the school was opened under Saddam Hussein as part of his drive to open the country to western influence, and now it's in trouble because of western interference. "Mission accomplished"...(we never did get that "banghead" smilie, did we? guess this'll have to do )

I remember an interview with the Olympic gold-medal figure skater John Curry at the time he was winning all his awards. His free-skate was done to music for the ballet Don Quixote, and he was asked why he'd used ballet music (apparently not something male skaters had done before). He said that he'd wanted to be a ballet dancer when he was growing up but his father refused to let him, so he took up skating instead and then tried hard to make his skating as balletic as possible. His implication, during the interview, was that his father thought that ballet was for homosexuals and effeminate men, and that was why he wouldn't let his son take it up. This always struck me as backward thinking, as though he thought that if he didn't let his son become a ballet dancer (or possibly a fashion designer or hairdresser, maybe), it would mean he wasn't gay, as though your chosen profession is the thing that determines your sexual orientation. I know this sort of prejudice isn't nearly as dangerous as the sort of religious extremism that results in children being killed for wanting to dance or wanting to be educated, but in its way it's just as narrow minded and just causes people to be unhappy. And of course, forbidding a boy from becoming a ballet dancer isn't going to stop him being gay, if that's his orientation. It might make him grow up concealing his orientation, and maybe that would have been enough for Curry Sr. I was always happy that John Curry won his gold medal, because that must have been some sort of compensation for having his dance ambitions thwarted.

If you have Oxi-Clean over there, you could try that.It's really good for things like tea and coffee stains, but I'm not sure newsprint ink is organic. Worth a try, though. I had a look online and I saw one page suggesting a combination of Oxi-Clean and rubbing alcohol. Sounds as though you'd want to keep the windows open if you were using that combination! http://www.howtocleanstuff.net/how-to-remove-ink-stains-from-carpet/ Just don't rub the carpet with anything or it'll grind it in. Blot the stains with a cloth or - you know - soak your husband with Oxi-Clean and rubbing alcohol and roll him gently back and forward across the floor.

Had a problem a few days ago where the internet stopped working so I was trying to navigate the automated reply feature at the provider's phone number. It's so much fun, when you're sitting on hold because you have no internet access, to be told by this electronic voice that it'd be so much quicker and easier to just go to Comcast.com and get my problem fixed that way. Which is all well and good if my problem didn't happen to be NO INTERNET ACCESS...(and by this time I was already onto the press-1-if-you-can't-access-your-internet part of the menu)

I'd love to get tickets for 18 Oct but being a weekend it's probably going to sell out really quickly. Wonder if we can finally plan a trip to the UK to coincide with the Royal Ballet being in residence and performing. A whole evening of Ashton would be so wonderful.

There's an article on the Royal Ballet School website about the former and current Junior Associates in the production, and it mentions Joe Parker (no details beyond saying that he's nine): http://www.royalballetschool.org.uk/2014/04/winters-tale-starring-junior-associates/ I found this from his ballet school, saying he'd been accepted into JA's; looks as though he's from the Torquay area. I think this is the same school that Lauren Cuthbertson attended; not sure if that's significant. http://www.buckinghamdancestudios.com/

Well, one thing I don't understand in the synopsis is that Leontes is supposed to have seen the error of his ways at the end of Act 1. So why did Paulina see a need to hide Hermione from him for 16 years?

When we visit, we stay at a hotel that's within walking distance of most of the places we want to go (except for the museums and palace at Kensington), so we don't have to worry too much about public transport. I used to work in London back in the late 1970s and it was a lot easier to get around then.

We've found that London is increasingly crowded - and more expensive - every time we visit. We only come over once a year at the most, and try to avoid being there in summer, but even during term-time it seems to be crowded everywhere.

I wouldn't. It's your opinion, which you're entitled to, I don't know you, so - again with all due respect - I wouldn't mind one way or the other. It's your choice what you spend your money on and what you don't. The Royal Ballet means something to me, the National Ballet of Canada doesn't, and that's just the way it is. When we lived in San Francisco we had season tickets to the San Francisco Ballet, and also saw quite a lot of the Smuin Ballet, Oakland Ballet, and Ballet San Jose, but the high point of those years for me was the time the Royal Ballet visited there and I got to see them dancing Ashton again. I never really developed an emotional connection to any of the local companies, and I haven't seen much of the Washington Ballet since we moved here although Septime Webre has made it a lot better than it was in the 1980s. And Meunier, honestly - broader shoulders? I don't think Canada is going to lose sleep over my opinion. And I am never going to apologise for being a Little Englander. Like I said, decades of being an unwilling expat can really harden the feelings of patriotism.

I hope he doesn't really believe what he says about how these saintly ticket touts are offering such a valuable service. He surely can't be that stupid. When he says "ticket resellers act like classic entrepreneurs because they fill a gap in the market that they have identified; they provide a service that can help people who did not obtain a supply of tickets in the original sale..." he must know that a major reason people didn't obtain a supply of tickets in the original sale is that a lot of tickets were snapped up by touts for that very reason. And that if the touts weren't making a fine art of buying every ticket they could buy, there wouldn't be such a big gap in the first place. It's one thing to meet a demand; it's another thing entirely to create that demand in the first place and then act as though you're doing your victims a favour by making them pay through the nose for tickets they could have bought at face value until you horned in on them. Unfotunately it's yet another thing to be praised to the skies for it by the Secretary of State for Culture. Maybe, with his income, paying thousands for a ticket that originally cost a small fraction of that is small change, but for most of us it isn't.

Because I'm British, the Royal Ballet is my home company (along with ENB), I've been following it since the 1970s, and the National Ballet of Canada doesn't mean any more to me than any other foreign company. If I'm going to pay to see The Winter's Tale, I'd rather pay to see the Royal Ballet do it, in whatever medium that is. I'm not going to claim that this is a rational attitude or anything, but spending decades being an unwilling expat has its effects.

I had that problem a while ago on a Xenforo forum. I eventually managed to log out in a different browser, and after a day or two IE got the message and logged me out too.

Since they won't be showing it in cinemas in the USA, at least this year, I hope it isn't too long before a DVD is released. I really want to see this ballet (and by the RB, not the Canadian version), but there don't seem to be many options at the moment.

I agree with some of the thinking behind this way of doing things, except that when the person with the high profile - which tends to be the minister, not the civil servants who are doing most of the actual heavy lifting - is manifestly ignorant of the topics he's supposed to be representing (like an environment minister who's a global warming denier, for example, or an education minister who's a creationist), that sends a message to the public that the government isn't taking the topic seriously. It also suggests that the minister isn't in a position to advocate for his own sphere of influence, if he doesn't know anything about it by the time he's reached the age and educational level of most members of the government. I don't think these people necessarily need to be experts or anything, but I do think it'd help if they had some sort of connection to the remit of their portfolio.

They also have (at least in the USA) a feature where 100 books are available every month for $3.99 or less. Some of these are genuine bargains because I recently saw one of my purchases from last summer listed at $11.99 for the Kindle edition. Not sure if Amazon UK does likewise - the e-book laws mean that British and American buyers can only buy from their domestic Amazon, which is a pain.

Well, I'm not sure that it's better to find that this quote is from 2011, because it shows that his opinions about ticket touts were known well before his appointment was made. If that's his connection to cultural matters, and one of the reasons he was considered suitable for the job, we're in for interesting times. I hope the government subsidies mentioned in the ROH response survive his tenure.

Well, the current environment minister is a history graduate, so it's no surprise that he doesn't know what he's talking about regarding global warming. But then he got his job from the same source that thinks a banker is an ideal candidate as minister for culture. I suppose we can only hope they have staff who have some sort of clue about the topic they're supposed to be running.

I'm not sure about these cultural boycotts. Yes, they do have their effects, but sometimes it's just an easy option for the politicians - to be seen to be doing something while not really doing any of the hard stuff that actually might make a difference. In the meantime, the people who suffer are the artists/athletes and their public. I remember how devastated some of the Olympic athletes were back in the 1980s during the tit-for-tat boycotts of the Moscow and Los Angeles Olympics, because an eight-year wait for the next Olympics can mean the difference between winning a medal and being an also-ran (or even not qualifying for the event). Boycotts work a lot better against societies that are anxious about their international self-image - I don't think Putin's Russia is in that category at the moment. As you and MAB said (and as I saw on the BBC website this morning), President Putin has a huge hold over the EU because he has control of a lot of the energy the EU uses. He doesn't seem to be using the directly coercive argument of "do as I say or the gas stops flowing," it's a lot more like "oh dear, I'm afraid I'm being left with no choice," but the effect will be the same. So, as you also said, something will have to be done unless the EU is content to dance to his tune. And that something is going to have to be the harder choice of pursuing energy independence, with probably some short-term pain for Europe, than things like cultural boycotts which at this stage will just hurt the people concerned and have no effect on the politicians. This may be one of those cases where soft power is too soft.

The thing about soft power is that it's soft, so it's not so easy to recognise its effects, especially if you're on the receiving end of them. Religious zealots are usually pretty direct in their approach - convert or die, do things this way or die - so soft power isn't a factor there, because it isn't being used. Not that religious leaders aren't capable of using soft power to their advantage, but fundamentalists usually don't. However, that sort of overt oppression tends to cause the sort of backlash I mentioned in my last post. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Interregnum in Britain in the 1650s was followed by a socially lax and pleasure-oriented few years, where Charles II's popularity rested quite a lot on his encouragement of the arts (visual arts, drama, dancing) that had been forbidden under Cromwell's regime. People were happy to be allowed to have fun, and that gave the King some support that he might not otherwise have had. I agree with Professor Nye (very interesting article, btw!) that all the soft power in the world isn't going to help if it starkly contradicts the way a government conducts its business - in this day and age of instantaneous information, people aren't going to be taken in by a nation that uses figure skaters and ballet dancers as ambassadors of its goodwill if it's committing atrocities at home and abroad at the same time. But soft power can still be useful in getting under people's skin and promoting the culture of a country that's being more subtle in its use of hard power. It's a pretty handy way of promoting a nation's self-image, especially to people who are inclined to be receptive anyway. I'm still amused by American friends who are surprised that Britain isn't totally covered by landscapes straight out of Midsomer Murders and Downton Abbey, and I still remember how surprised I was by the poverty in many parts of the USA when I first saw it, because American movies and TV tended to focus a lot on the absurdly wealthy (Dallas, anyone?) and the suburban American Dream. I think Terpsichore is quite right in saying that the appeal of American culture, especially to young people, had its effect during the breakup of the Soviet Union. I also believe that the weaker effect of western culture in the Middle East and South Asia at the moment is partly to do with the fact that the western countries aren't practising what they preach regarding democracy, self-determination, etc, and the attraction of the culture can't overcome that. I know there are other effects, but I think this is one of them.

This reminds me of the comment in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (of course I can't find my copy to get the exact quote - I swear this house has a black hole that books fall into for months on end) that the best way to enslave a society is to make the people love being slaves. I think soft power is a good example of that. If you try to keep people under control with violence and threats, especially the people of a country you've invaded, you'll just cause resentment and uprisings. But if you do it by giving people something pleasant to distract them - which includes subtle undermining of their heritage by providing cultural and educational opportunities - you'll probably be a lot more successful.

Has there, in living memory, been a Culture Minister who did have some interest in culture? And, if so, did it make any difference?

Some people are much more interested in travelling and adventure and new experiences than others. For me, the offer of a year abroad would have been horrifying. Everyone on my father's side of the family is addicted to travel, and my dad would get very irritable if he hadn't been on foreign travel for a while, so we always had to go to some other bloody country for summer holidays. Apparently I didn't inherit that gene. For me, travelling is utter torture and I hated being away from home (I still have nightmarish memories of being dragged round Europe on summer holidays by my travel-addicted parents and hating every minute of it). Still do - I've lived in the USA for 35 years and have been homesick the whole time (but visiting the UK requires travelling - such a dilemma!). I just wanted to be left alone to do my thing in familiar surroundings. I can honestly say that for me there's nowhere in the world (with the possible exception of Yellowstone) that was worth the trouble of travelling to get to and I feel more enriched by the reading I've done than the travelling. I guess people are different, and the thing is to make the most of the way they are, not try to make them into something they aren't. Unless there's some sort of pathology to Sean's behavior, which there doesn't seem to be, I wouldn't worry.