SDcamps•演辩营全国英语演讲与辩论赛
A former cabinet minister once infamously described the homeless as "the people you step over when you're coming out of the opera." As reprehensible a joke as it is, his words are about to be thrown back at him, or rather sung back, by the kind of people he once stepped over. This week, Streetwise Opera, a company made up of homeless and ex-homeless players, is...
It was Bob Diamond, recently of Barclays, who defined business culture as "how people behave when no one is watching." Speaking in a lecture sponsored by the Today programme last year, he declared that business corporations like Barclays had to learn how to be better citizens. Leaving on one side the irony of all this, what is remarkable is not that he said it, but...
As a boy I'd have been in dead trouble if I'd ever used the name of Jesus as a swear word at home. Blasphemy just wasn't tolerated, even though my parents were non-believers. The boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable language are shifting all the time. John Terry, for instance, has just been acquitted in court of racial abuse. But when I started out as a...
"I'm spiritual but I'm not religious" is now a commonplace among people in Britain, the majority of whose population live their lives without reference to organised religion. In my role as an Anglican priest, I meet significant numbers of people who are on the cusp of leaving the church or on the cusp of wondering whether there's anything in it – ...
I was attending a workshop on women and violence. One told her story. She was 18 and visiting a farm with her boyfriend. Alone together, they had sex even though she didn't want to. Guilt-ridden, humiliated and demeaned, why didn't she report it? Because even though she had clearly said no, it didn't occur to her for nearly ten years that she had just been raped....
On the train yesterday I sat next to a family with some very excited children who were off on holiday. You couldn't help being caught up in their sense of excitement and anticipation. I know just how they feel. I keep wanting to say: Are we there yet? For the past five years as head of Multi-faith Chaplaincy for the London Organising Committee I've seen the Olympic s...
Some of the parents I know with teenage children who use cannabis are fairly relaxed about what's happening. 在我认识的父母中，有些并不在意孩子吸食大麻。 "It isn't doing any harm", one tells me, "Alcohol's much worse." “这又没什么害处，”其中一人跟我说，“酒精比这可怕多了。” Others would really like their children to stop but are at their wits e...
Whatever happened to the silly season? 今年的新闻饥荒期是怎么回事？ You know, that time of the year when the wisdom of the 1st century poet Horace is adopted by news editors, 新闻饥荒期，众所周知，就是每年记者们对公元1世纪的诗人贺拉斯说过的一句至理名言进行实践的一段时期。 "Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans, it's lovely to be silly at the right moment&...
"What is a Caucus-race?" asked Alice during her adventure in Wonderland. The Dodo explained. “什么是会议式赛跑？”爱丽丝在梦游仙境中问到。渡渡鸟解释道。 First you mark out a racecourse, though the shape of it doesn't really matter. 首先你拟定出一条跑道，形状是什么样的并不重要。 Then you shout out, one, two three, go, and you run around in any direction you like ...
Newspaper obituaries are a useful window onto history and reading accounts of the life of the late politician Alf Morris this week reminded me just how different Britain was 50 years ago before Morris and fellow MP Jack Ashley championed the disabled. Until the late 1960s disability was something that was seen as essentially a private misfortune. When I was a child you would...
The original Olympic Games were far from being a meaningless tribute to ancient pagan Gods, Zeus and his many relations. The ancient Greeks can still help us understand what has been happening over these last two weeks, if we shake their genuine insight into human nature free of its mythological language. One thing stands out immediately. The world lost something immensely v...
In a pre-flight news conference in the summer of 1969 1969年夏天，在一次飞行前的新闻发布会上 Neil Armstrong said, "I think we're going to the moon because it is in the nature of the human being to face challenges. 尼尔·阿姆斯特朗说，“我认为我们要去月球，因为人类要面临挑战。 It's by the nature of his deep inner soul". 这是他的本性深层的内在灵魂。” A few days...
Being here in Edinburgh on the opening day of the International Book Festival feels like the perfect place to celebrate words and stories, especially as we're about to turn the last page of the Olympic blockbuster which has had more thrills and spills and tears and triumphs than any bestseller. You know the way you inhabit a novel when it grips your imagination. Your min...
With Mitt Romney's presidential nomination confirmed in a barnstorming acceptance speech two days ago, 米特·罗姆尼两天前的提名巡回演讲进一步巩固了他总统候选人提名的身份。 the race to the White House is now well under way. 通往白宫的角逐正在顺利展开。 For most of us outside the United States, the battle for power is as inscrutable as a test match is to the average America...
If a butterfly flutters its wings, so chaos theory goes, it can cause the path of a tornado to change, and so the reverberations can be felt across the world. 混沌学理论提到，如果一只蝴蝶煽动翅膀，卷风的路线会因其改变，全世界都将感觉到随之而来的影响。 In retrospect, it looks as if what was happening to the cost of food in the Middle East a few years ago had just that impact....
Earlier this week Sir Elton John expressed anxieties about how his young son, Zachary, might be treated when he goes to school. 本周早些时候，艾尔顿·约翰爵士坦言自己对儿子扎卡里的担心， He fears he might face bullying because his parents are gay and Britain can still be homophobic. 害怕他会因为父母是同性恋在学校受到欺负，毕竟英国人依旧排斥同性恋。 He may be right, though in ...
Certain appalling events in history stay with us in the form of particular images 某些可怕的历史事件陪伴我们的是特定的图片， and in the case of the Hillsborough disaster the image that sticks in my mind is that of fans being pulled to the safety of the upper tier 在希尔斯伯勒发生的惨案仍然印在我的脑海里，球迷被上边的人拉到安全区的上排， by the people above and of a man on th...
"A few years ago my middle son who was around seven years old at the time, had cycled away from home without telling anyone. “几年前，七岁左右的儿子一声不吭地骑车离开了家。 It was a mild summer evening and there were many children playing in their gardens. 那是一个夏季的傍晚，天气怡人，许多孩子在院子里玩耍。 Our new house was in a family friendly estate and despite tryi...
Must all good things really come to an end? 天下真的没有不散的宴席？ This weekend we must steel ourselves to say farewell to "London 2012", 本周末，我们必须坚定地对“伦敦2012”告别。 and I think it'd be fair to say that for a lot of us sceptics, 虽然我们常对事情抱有怀疑态度， the Olympics and Paralympics crept up on and then quite simply overtook us with their un...
There was just a hint in Stephen Hester's interview on this programme yesterday that the banking sector has finally run out of fig leaves. To his credit, the Royal Bank of Scotland boss certainly used honest language. He talked about remodelling the banking sector, cleaning up the problems of the past, making the bank safe and stronger through physical and cultural chang...