The question mark hanging over the very existence of newspapers raises the question: is there a future for the written word? BBC business editor Robert Peston is certain there is: in a recent lecture, he says that the blog is at the very heart of his work, enabling him to ‘share information — some of it hugely important, some of it less so — with a big and interested audience’. He sees this as critical to democracy. Ancient Greeks would be wary of his conclusion.
In a play by Euripides, the priggish young man Hippolytus learns from a do-gooding nurse that his stepmother Phaedra is wasting away out of lust for him. Appalled, he roundly abuses all womankind and Phaedra, mortified at the revelation of the feelings she has honourably tried to keep hidden, commits suicide.
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