Ideal Syllabus: Katrina Palmer frieze.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from frieze.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A series of instincts, thousands of tiny adjustments, hundreds of drafts … What is the mysterious process writers go through to get an idea on to the page?
Illustration by Joe Ciardiello.
The thing about big plans is that they require people to carry them out. The problem of personnel particularly plagued Peter the Great. Convinced by his European advisers that his country was backward and stuck in a medieval mindset, he spent much of his reign on a series of modernizing initiatives intended to get Russia “caught up” with the West. To implement his reforms which included establishing a navy, imposing a tax on beards, and eventually drafting half a million serfs to build a city (named after himself) on nothing but marshland he needed a robust bureaucracy and a standing military that could manage the demands of his new, spruced-up empire. Peter thus made service civil or military compulsory for the Russian nobility, and he implemented a new class system, the Table of Ranks, under which one could be promoted according to how long and how well one served.
Head back to the past with old-time radio
A wealth of radio shows from the 1930s through 50s, the golden age of the medium, are available free online. Miguel Porlan/The New York Times.
by Barry Yourgrau
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
.- In the image and video cacophony of our world, theres an old-fashioned medium that rouses and works with our own powers of imagination, one that suits these cooped-up inner-world days of ours. Its radio drama, especially from its golden age, in the 1930s through the 50s, when radio was king of home entertainment. Thanks to the internet, the archival wealth of such shows constructed from dialogue and sound effects, with a touch of narration and music is freely available. Here are six to enjoy whenever and wherever, indoors or out.