Television past, as LP Hartley might have once said, is another country. And, in the early 1980s it certainly was a different beast. There were still only three channels to watch; the evening's programmes finished with the playing of the national anthem; and the biggest prize on TV was not Chris Tarrant's million pounds but a speedboat on Bullseye . . . But as Tom Bromley suggests in this funny and warming memoir, all that was about to change: The 1980s saw the end of the original golden era of television, and the beginnings of TV as we know it today. In 1982, Channel 4 became the first new terrestrial channel for almost twenty years and by the end of the decade, Rupert Murdoch's Sky Television was vying to become Britain's first multi-channel provider. The result of all this was that slowly but surely, British viewers had more choice than ever before and the cost of this choice was the erosion of television as a shared national event. And no-one felt this change more deeply than Tom Bromley. Television played a large part in Tom's childhood. His first word was 'two', as in BBC Two, and his earliest childhood memory is seeing Johnny Ball at a church fete. With great humour and affection, Tom Bromley tells the story of a childhood spent with his three siblings and that other all-important family member; the television set.

This is a biography of Kenny Everett, who died of AIDS in April 1995. As a broadcaster he changed the presentation of music radio forever with his zany, irreverent and anarchic humour. His career spanned and helped to shape the key moments in broadcasting history: pirate radio, the birth of Radio 1 and the start of commercial radio.

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Clement of Alexandria and the Judgement of Taste: Pedagogical Rhetoric and Christian Formation provides a new account of Clement of Alexandria's Paedagogus as a programme in the formation of the judgement of taste, situating it in critical dialogue with modern approaches to the judgement of taste and aesthetics. The book's key questions are framed in light of Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction (1979): a landmark in twentieth-century scholarship on the theory of taste. J. M. F. Heath studies Clement's rhetoric and theology in the context of the Christian Second Sophistic, when Christians were experimenting with new ways of inhabiting the rhetorical and philosophical culture of the Greco-Roman world. The Paedagogus shows Clement's pedagogical method and rhetorical strategy at the early stages of Christian formation when his audience are not yet ready for abstract philosophical argument. This was a time for forming people's habits of judgement and preferences of 'taste', so as to ground their daily lives in deeper desires and aversions that are structured through a relationship with God. This was an immensely important stage of Christian formation: many people never got beyond this to any sort of philosophical curriculum, and yet, through engaging the 'tastes' of a wide audience, Christian leaders sought to spread the gospel--and succeeded in doing so. Even for the intellectual elites, personal formation through preferences of taste was part of how they embodied their desire for God, and the way they inhabited it through the sacramental and ascetic life of the church. Bourdieu's sociological and anthropological approach proves fruitful for understanding aspects of Clement's rhetorical method and purpose, but the study of Clement's theological rhetoric in its cultural context also, in turn, points the way to a theological response to Bourdieu's theory of taste.

Challenging prevailing trends toward aesthetic neutrality, James S. Hans argues that there is such a thing as good and bad taste, that taste is something one is born with, and that it is firmly rooted in the mechanics of biology. Taste is everything, Hans says, for it produces the primary values that guide our lives. Taste is the fundamental organizing mechanism of human bodies, a lifelong effort to fit one's own rhythms to the rhythms and patterns of the natural world and the larger human community. It is an aesthetic sorting process by which one determines what belongs in--a conversation, a curriculum, a committee, a piece of art, a meal, a logical argument--and what should be left out. On the one hand, taste is the source of beauty, justice, and a sense of the good. On the other hand, as an arbiter of the laws of fair and free play, taste enters into more ominous and destructive patterns--but patterns nonetheless--of resentment and violence. Hans develops his conception of taste through astute readings of five literary landmarks: Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Sophocles' Oedipus the King, William Faulkner's Light in August, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson and the Polish Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz. These texts explore the art of soulmaking and the quest for personal expression: the costs as well as the fruits that come from acceding to the imperatives of one's being. They also reveal how the collision of personal and collective rhythms, whether in the Greek citadel or the Mississippi countryside, leads to violence and ritualized sacrifice. Elegant, principled, and provocative, The Sovereignty of Taste is an essential book that restores taste to its rightful place of influence, shoring up the ground beneath civilization's feet and offering hope for the future of integrity, value, and aesthetic truth.