I have always been fascinated by the way music can completely change the way you watch film – and how you feel as you watch the images. Adam Curtis Read Quote
As well as our relationship with Afghanistan, I am researching the legacy of other European empires – in Africa. We think of those empires as history, but actually, they still haunt our everyday lives in the strangest of ways. Adam Curtis Read Quote
In the battle for Kobane on the Syrian border, everyone talks about the enemy – IS – and the frightening ideas that drive them. No one talks about the Kurdish defenders and what inspires them. Adam Curtis Read Quote
Politicians used to have the confidence to tell us stories that made sense of the chaos of world events. But now there are no big stories, and politicians react randomly to every new crisis – leaving us bewildered and disorientated. Adam Curtis Read Quote
There is a lurking sense that there is a kind of seedy corruption underlying a lot of public life today. But while journalism does a very good job of describing that corruption, it is failing to bring it into a bigger focus. To explain what it is all about. Adam Curtis Read Quote
Ever since the economic crisis in 2008, millions of people have accepted cuts in all sorts of things – from real wages and living standards to benefits and hospital care – without any real opposition. The cuts may be right, or they may be stupid – but the astonishing thing is how no-one really challenges them. Adam Curtis Read Quote
Journalists, whose job is to pull back and tell dramatic stories that bring power into focus, find it impossible because things like economic theory are both incomprehensible and, above all, boring. The same is true of ‘management science.’ Adam Curtis Read Quote
The problem with wonks is that they can’t deal with emotion and feeling, and they don’t like stories. It means that they cannot connect at all with the feelings and imaginations of the voters. Adam Curtis Read Quote
A conveyor belt of Think Tank pundits and allied operatives poured into the TV studios, and together they built a fortress around Mrs. Thatcher’s memory that was rooted in theories about economics. They did this because economics is the only language that wonks understand. Adam Curtis Read Quote
