An interesting book I'm reading at present is Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm's Fractured Times, Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century.

Significant is the chapter on Karl Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind.
The American Cowboy:An international Myth? offers an insight into spaghetti westerns.

Delving into the matter of gender equality, the historian notes that it's  towards the end of the nineteenth century that we find a distinct tendency in Europe and North America to treat women as persons in the same sense of bourgeois society, analogous to males, and therefore analogous towards potential achievers. This applied to significantly symbolic field such as sport which was just then developing.

In 1914 hardly any government had given votes to women, but ten years later the right of women to vote was part of the constitution in most states of Europe and North America.

On the contribution of parents or family authority figures, besides the feminist movement, facilitating women enter public sphere Hobsbawm cites that, "In the biographies and autobiographies of the lower orders, it is more often mothers than fathers who encourage the intellectual or cultural ambitions of sons: D.H.Lawrence is a good case in point."

Another point he makes is that the women of 1880-1914 knew quite well that men and women were not alike, even when they did the same things, recognized each other as complete equals, or played the same public roles, as a glance at Rosa Luxemburg's letters and Beatrice Webb's diaries shows..
"What it does mean is that by this time the insistence that women having a separate sphere, including the claim that they had a special responsibility for culture, was associated with political and social reaction."

On Art, in the author's own words: “At the end of the twentieth century the work of art not only became lost in the spate of words, sounds and images in the universal environment that once would have been calld ‘art’, but also vanished in this dissolution of the aesthetic experience in the sphere where it is impossible to distinguish between feelings that have developed within us and those that have been brought in from outside. In these circumstances, how can we speak of art?”

On Manifestos

"How will manifestos survive the twenty-first century? Political parties and movements are not what they were in the last century and they were, after all, one of the two great producers of manifestos. The arts were the other. Again, with the rise of the business society and MBA jargon, they have been largely replaced by that appalling invention, the 'mission statement.' None of the mission statements I have come across says anything worth saying, unless you are a fan of badly written platitudes."

"..Most of what the manifesto (Communist Manifesto) actually recommended is of purely historical interest, and most readers skip it except for the clarion call at the end -the one about the workers having nothing to lose except their chains, they have a world to win. Workers of all countries unite. Unfortunately this is also well past its sell-by date."


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