In style and technique the works of England’s 19th century movers and shakers the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, marked a return to the early Italian Renaissance. By contrast their subject matter was radical and innovative.

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The design origins of casement windows are based in European classical architecture and usually had detailed curved stone headers, deep overhanging classical cornices and, the French essential, projecting attic rooms.

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A connoisseur, scholar and devout Buddhist, within the forbidden city Chinese Emperor Qianlong created a luxurious garden compound to serve throughout his retirement as a secluded place of contemplation, repose and entertainment. When the city was shut down following the Chinese revolution of 1911 – 1912 many of its treasures gathered dust for a century. Now, through a great deal of international cooperation and negotiation they have been conserved and sent on tour.

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On our You Tube Channel you will find our mini-documentaries, which provide an insight into the evolution of art, design, music, fashion and style.

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Can’t wait for the Pan Am television series to come Australia. It’s set in the era when Aussies fell in love with America. So be sure to look to the skies and watch out for Pan Am. It’s ‘out there ‘where the air is rarified, where we can just ‘glide, starry -eyed’ and get ready to pack up and fly away

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The Melbourne city precinct from Federation Square to Bourke Street Mall has been transformed into a Christmas wonderland. From the precinct of St Paul’s Cathedral where Christmas light projections reflect on the original Christmas journey to the Docklands packed with tourists from around the country and overseas there is plenty of meeting and greeting, eating and drinking going on.

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The filming of the second series of Sherlock has just been completed in England. Re-invented by Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis of Dr Who fame when traveling, most appropriately on a train, Holmes and Watson were resurrected as living, breathing, modern men just as they were originally. For fans of the shrewd, sexy savvy reincarnation of one of fiction’s most enduring characters this is the good news they have been waiting to hear.

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Down through the centuries horses have contributed much to the cultural development of every country on earth and, in art, in flight and in life an association with horses cannot do anything else but enrich it.

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All cultures on earth, just like individuals, have distinct modes of existence. Creation stories are something they all have in common in a logical attempt to rationalize the presence of humans on earth.

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During the reign of Augustus (31BC – 14ACE) Rome emerged as an economically successful city with a population approaching one million. To become a free citizen of Rome was considered a great honour.

Whoever you were if you were born within the boundaries of the Roman Empire you had the right to hold the highest office in the State. Under Augustus the concept of an eternal Rome emerged, revealing its link to the legendary past and its promise of a new era.

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Classical architecture reflects the very nature of a society, its attitudes and philosophies, fashion and passions. It provides us with an insight into the cultural development of ancient Greece and Rome at any given time in their history.

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Captain Arthur Phillip laid the foundation stone of Australia’s first government house within four months of sailing into Port Jackson on January 26 1788 with the first fleet. Against a background of a natural environment its indigenous inhabitants had never disturbed, at the time, it was an assertion of culture in the colonies.

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Swiss born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (1887-1965) was 29 when he went to Paris. Soon after his arrival he adopted his maternal grandfather’s name, Le Corbusier, as a pseudonym. He changed his persona from Jeanneret the small-town architect to Le Corbusier the world’s next visionary artist. He expressed a view that architecture had lost its way. He was convinced the bold new industrial age dawning required an audacious style of architecture. Who better to design it than himself. “We must start again from zero,” he proclaimed.

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In London much of the development in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century was in the hands of aristocratic landowners. But were they ‘compleat’ gentlemen?

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American Philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics in the Philosophy Department, Law School, and Divinity School at the University of Chicago. In her short and powerful new book called Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities she makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. She challenges us all to strive be truly human – ‘to remain childlike, to keep an open mind, to refine an ability to remain humble, to eschew pride and arrogance and to be reverent towards other people and towards the natural world’.

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The 2011 Mostra Internazionale D’Arte Cinematografica la Biennale di Venezia held recently was host to a whole new raft of so-called ‘intelligent movies’ distinguished actors like Britain’s heartthrob Colin Firth believes audiences are clamouring for.

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