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All work and no play is dulling our senses

Ancient Greek philosophers reckoned that life was all about free time, but 16th-century puritanism dealt a blow to the old festive culture from which we’ve never fully recovered

2 March 2024

9:00 AM

2 March 2024

9:00 AM

Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal Gary S. Cross

New York University Press, pp.340, 29.99

Free Time is an academic journey through two-and-half millennia of leisure options. The central question put by the historian Gary Cross, is: why do we not have more free time, and when we do, why do we waste it, like Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, on ‘fencing, dancing and bear-baiting’ or their modern equivalents?

We start with ancient Greek philosophers, including Socrates and Aristotle, who reckoned that life was all about free time.

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