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Available for over a year

The changing meaning of friendship over the centuries: the weekly omnibus edition of Dr Thomas Dixon's timely history. From social networks involving perhaps 150 friends around the well or at the bake-house, to contemporary Social Networks which might extend over the globe and include a thousand Friends, Thomas Dixon's history considers both the differences and similarities between friendships as we experience them today and as people lived them out in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This first of three omnibus editions takes on board questions of the function of friendship - emotional or instrumental; the Biblical contradictions about friendships - universal or individual; the impact of commerce and politics on friendship; and whether men and women can really be friends without a sexual element. Producer: Beaty Rubens.