Ada Bronowski is a writer, scriptwriter and VR film-maker. She published a book on ancient Stoic metaphysics, The Stoics on Lekta: All There is to Say (OUP), and an edited volume of letters from writers and artists from antiquity to the modern day called Dear Friend, You Must Change Your Life (Bloomsbury). She writes about dance, literature, philosophy, film and tv. Email: ada.bronowski [at] gmail.com
by Ada Bronowski The philosopher Aristotle, who lived in the 4th century BC, wrote in The Nicomachean Ethics that you cannot become good without practice. Even the ideal utterly good person whose every action is carried out at the right time for the right reason, has gone through a long process of trial and error;…
by Ada Bronowski Lightness comes in three F’s: finesse, flippancy and fantasy. The French are famous for the first. See how the delicate, sweet singer songwriter Alain Souchon transforms the heavyweight aphorism of André Malraux – the real-life French Indiana Jones who ended his career as minister for culture – from the desperate heroism of…
by Ada Bronowski It is a truth Disneylandly acknowledged that ‘when the world turns its back on you, you turn your back on the world’. A famous piece of advice given by the little meerkat from The Lion King encapsulates a philosophy that grounds not only the destinies of all the great Disney heroes, from…
by Ada Bronowski Nanni Moretti has always been a melancholic in denial. Perhaps more than any other film-director raised on the French New Wave – born in 1953, shooting his first short in 1973 – Moretti has been turning around the question that François Truffaut posed as a key to the seventh art: is cinema…
by Ada Bronowski One of the amusing things about academic conferences – for a European – is to meet with American scholars. Five minutes into an amicable conversation with an American scholar and they will inevitably confide in a European one of two complaints: either how all their fellow American colleagues are ‘philistines’ (a favourite…
by Ada Bronowski The state of Israel is on the brink of deliquescence. A corrupt multi-indicted prime minister has handed the reins of government to extremist (read: blood-thirsty) right-wing (read: populist imperialist) religious (read: obscurantist) coalition parties whose alliance is based on a net refusal to heed the Israeli Supreme Court and a pact to…
by Ada Bronowski There is something bewildering about life in Paris under Nazi occupation: theatres, cinemas, cabarets and cafés in full swing, swarming with Nazi officials mingling with the locals, when, all the while, people are arrested in broad daylight, dragged out of their apartments, tracked, tortured and killed for being Jewish or communist, active…
by Ada Bronowski The weird and wonderful painter Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825), whose most famous work is undoubtedly The Nightmare from 1781, presents an interesting case of dysmorphia. The Nightmare is as disturbing as it is entrancing with its undercurrents of erotic terror and dreamy fantasy, but its surface horror is perhaps not what is…
by Ada Bronowski Why celebrate first times? If, admittedly, from the first time you have sex to the first time you taste escargots à la bourguignonne, hear Allegri’s Miserere or read Dostoevsky’s Demons, you, personally, undergo internal cataclysms which change you permanently, are not these moments blatant gulfs of ignorance and inexperience that you thankfully…
by Ada Bronowski A philosopher and a stand-up comedian walk into a bar…the beginning of a joke? Or perhaps a history of humanity from the margins. The philosopher and the stand-up comedian are two figures that keep reappearing across the ages, cutting familiar silhouettes of odd bodies making odd claims about the world and its…
by Ada Bronowski Indifference is an attitude first theorised as a philosophical stance by ancient Greek Stoic philosophers from the 3rd century BC. It was conceived as the right attitude to cultivate in reaction to indifferent things. What was surprising were the things the Stoics considered to be indifferent and hence require us to be…
by Ada Bronowski On the 13th September 2022, Jean-Luc Godard, the Franco-Swiss film-director, film-poet, film-philosopher, died at the age of 91. One of the most imaginative, rebellious, truly courageous artists on this planet whose existence, in more ways than can be enumerated in language, changed the face of our modernity, decided to end his life…
by Ada Bronowski The encounter between Oedipus and the Sphinx has always represented the encounter between two incompatible worlds: chaos versus reason, myth versus history, woman against man, enigmatic verbosity against crystal-clear clarity. Only one of these worlds can survive the clash. The Sphinx’s riddle: what stays the same yet walks on four feet in…
by Ada Bronowski More than an age of anxiety or anger, of indignation or self-righteousness, we live in an age of the constant high. We need not consume drugs or get inebriated to be met on a daily basis with sights and behaviours to which the only reasonable reaction is an alternation between ‘wow!’ and…