Holding up a Mirror How Civilizations Decline Anne Glyn-Jones Search Inside the Book at Amazon.com Search Inside the Book at Amazon.co.uk 652 pages ISBN 0 907845 60 6 (paperback), $29.90 / £17.95

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The good news is: that faith in material goods really does bring prosperity to society.

The bad news is: that self-same commitment to material things leads inexorably to the destruction of the civilizations it builds.

Using theatre as a measure society’s health, this book shows that Ancient Greece and Rome, Mediaeval Christendom and our own contemporary society all follow the same pattern: prosperity thrives on the conviction that the material world alone constitutes true ‘reality’; but that very conviction leads to a rejection of the supernatural, undermines absolute moral standards, and leads to cultural and social disintegration.

Critical acclaim for Holding up a Mirror

‘A visionary book. Painful yet true in its portrait of the present’ — Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

‘A thoroughly researched and illuminating reinterpretation of  “The Crisis of Our Age”’, — Angela Ellis-Jones, Times Literary Supplement

‘Her thesis is challenging and her examples abundant and abundantly interesting’, — Alan Massie, Daily Telegraph

‘Glyn-Jones’ intriguing book puts an entirely new gloss on the stereotyped picture of fanatical Islamic theocracy’, — Frank McLynn, New Statesman and Society

Review: The Mirror of Consciousness (full text)

Anne Glyn-Jones studied politics at Oxford and worked in theatre and television before becoming research archivist to Harold Macmillan. She was for twelve years Devon Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, and has published a number of sociological studies.

1 Illusion and Reality: Does It Matter Which is Which?   full text  (PDF format)

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2 From Metaphysics to Physics: the Sixth to Fourth Centuries in Greece

3 Hellenistic Pleasure and Prosperity: the Fourth to Second Centuries

4 The Greek World Disintegrates: the Second and First Centuries

5 Sententious to Saucy: the Roman World, Third Century BC to First AD

6 Pity and Fear? Or Brutalization? The Rise and Rise of the Amphitheatre

7 The Ascendancy of the Senses: the Late Republic and Early Empire

8 The Fruits of Materialism: the Late Republic and the Early Empire

9 Paying the Price: the Second and Third Centuries

10 The Shattering of the Mirror: the Fourth to Sixth Centuries

11 Through a Glass Darkly: the Sixth to Tenth Centuries

12 Scholars and Scientists: the Tenth to Twelfth Centuries

13 From the Mass to Melodrama: the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries

14 Post-Reformation Ambiguities: the Sixteenth to mid-Seventeenth Centuries

15 Rights Supplant Rites: the mid-Seventeenth to Late Eighteenth Centuries

16 Technology Triumphant: the Eighteenth Century

17 Propriety and Prosperity: the Nineteenth Century

18 Secular Certainties: the Early Twentieth Century

19 Secular Triumphs: the Late Twentieth Century

20 Art for Art’s Sake

21 Where the Rainbow Ends

22 Cause and Effect

23 Straws in the Wind

 

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