tury, a life of fascinating contrast and contradiction, of service and some degree of solitude. A complex, clever, eternally restless man.
His mother and father met at the funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901. At a time when all but four of Europe's nations were monarchies, his relatives were scattered through European royalty. Some royal houses were swept away by World War One; but the world into which Philip was born was still one where monarchies were the norm. His grandfather was the King of Greece; his great-aunt Ella was murdered along with the Russian tsar, by the Bolsheviks, at Ekaterinberg; his mother was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
His four older sisters would all marry Germans. While Philip fought for Britain in the Royal Navy, three of his sisters actively supported the Nazi cause; none would be invited to his wedding.
When peace came, and with it eventual economic recovery, Philip would throw himself into the construction of a better Britain, urging the country to adopt scientific methods, embracing the ideas of industrial design, planning, education and training. A decade before Harold Wilson talked of the "white heat of the technological revolution", Philip was urging modernity on the nation in speeches and interviews. And as the country and the world became richer and consumed ever more, Philip warned of the impact on the environment, well before it was even vaguely fashionable.
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ons, from a sculpture made from ocean plastic to chiselled outdoor seating.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, London Design Festival is one of the world's leading design events and a staple in the UK's cultural calendar. To mark the anniversary, more than 300 events across 12 design districts will operate across the capital city from 17 to 25 September.
Visitors can expect a varied roster of events including installations, workshops, exhibitions and product launches, as well as showroom tours, talks, trade fairs and other fringe events.
Activities set to take place on Monday 19 September will be rescheduled to honour Queen Elizabeth II's funeral.
See Dezeen Events Guide's digital guide to London Design Festival 2022 for more information on the many events taking place at this year's festival.
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Added by Michael Grove at 11:05 on September 20, 2022
f
Milan. One day Leonardo sat down and inscribed the top of a sheet
of paper using his idiosyncratic right-to-left mirror writing with the
words, “On the 2nd day of April 1489”, adding later... “Book entitled On the Human Figure”. As a new exhibition of his
anatomical studies at the Queen’s Gallery at the Palace of
Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh suggests, though, it would be another
two decades before he really hit his stride.
It is only a year, of course, since Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist,
a magnificent exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace
that showcased the full breadth of around 200 sheets of
anatomical studies by Leonardo in the Royal Collection.
Inevitably, the new exhibition, also curated by Martin Clayton,
feels less significant. While it sets Anatomical Manuscript A in
context by providing a handful of representative sheets from earlier
and later in Leonardo’s career, including one of the famous 1489
drawings of a sectioned skull, it does not offer a comprehensive
overview of his activities as an anatomist.
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to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence.
One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all-at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.
The collective abilities of such animals - none of which grasps the BIG PICTURE but each of which contributes to the group's success - can surely be analagous to the interconnections & the inter-reactions of interconnections of the crowds of peoples - in Hong Kong, Central London, Glasgow & Wembly over the course of the week-end - in no dissimilar way than swarming honey bees, which frequently differ about where to establish a new nest - invariably choose the best site - or "the birds" flocking through the trees of the forest in Psyop's superbly integral artistic animation for high definition MTV - perform with balletic co-ordination.…
Added by Michael Grove at 10:28 on November 28, 2010
blic service. None of the honours in her own gift (such as the Order of Merit, or the Royal Victorian Order, which acknowledges personal service to the sovereign) has never, to my knowledge, been contaminated. The degradation has always come through the usual run of honours which are awarded by the monarch on the advice of the prime minister.
All too often these have been very smelly indeed.
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