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Articles

Knowledge & History

On an evening out Grant Bartley realises the importance of perspective and hears George Soros talk about markets, ignorance and the Open Society.

If you want a broad understanding of life, consider seeing current affairs from a thousand-year perspective. Then focusing on shorter terms, you can see other perspectives nesting inside that thousand years, like Russian dolls. Like mapping a coastline, history’s shape depends on the level to which you’re defining it – whether you’re seeing it in terms of one, ten, a hundred or a thousand years. It’s impressive how different reality looks from each vantage.

This was made possible for me and a thousand others aptly at the cultural centre of the British Empire (R.

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