Monday 12 July 2010

Dinner with the stars

Here’s one of those popular dinner party conversations that cam up again over the weekend.

What place and period in history would you pick as being the best in history in which you might get a large number of your heroes around a dinner party table?

Maybe Athens in the Age of Pericles? Or Florence in the Renaissance? Edinburgh in the Age of Enlightenment? Philadelphia in the Agee of Revolution?  Or maybe Paris, in the Age of Romanticism?

For my part, I reckon the best time to put together a sparkling, sparky dinner party full of talented people from every field that you’d really want to meet, you’d be hard pressed to go past New York in the 1950s.  Just image the sort of talent you could put around the table from the folk who frequented Manhattan:

  • Frank Lloyd Wright
  • Maria Montessori
  • Arturo Toscanini
  • Ayn Rand
  • Pier Luigi Nervi
  • Duke Ellington
  • Albert Einstein
  • Terence Rattigan
  • Ludwig von Mises
  • Maria Callas
  • Joseph Campbell
  • Norman Borlaug
  • Fritz Lang

That’s a big table already, but there’d be some cracking conversations!  For such a gathering, it’d be an honour just to help pour the gravy.

When would you pick for your gathering—and with whom?

1 comment:

MarkT said...

That's a pretty good list, but I wonder if there's a tendency to only recognise someone's greatness after they've died - or at least decades after their most impressive acheivements.

To some extent that's completely rational, because it takes time for them to become well known and for history to show the importance of their acheivements.

Maybe by 2060-70 people will look back at the early 2000's and be saying the same thing about our era?