Hello and welcome to The Looking Glass, WBGS' very own Academic Blog. This year we are planning to breathe new life into this amazing blog as the Academic Head Boy team for 2025- 2026! However, at the Looking Glass we need your help to catapult this blog into it's GOLDEN AGE. We need your articles, your essays, your opinions and your finest work to MAKE THE LOOKING GLASS GREAT AGAIN! If you have read something interesting or watched something that sparked a thought on social media - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you entered a competition, however big or small - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you are interested in a specific field, issue or period - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you have produced artwork, a piece of music or creative writing - WE WILL PUBLISH IT! Your creative skills have been called to action - now we must muster to create, discover and explore. You are the creative minds of the future. The Plato's, the Newtons, the Angelo's, the Nietzsche's. This is your calling. This is Y...
HARRIS FELTON (L6) This article was written as part of the History Witold Pilecki Essay Competition 2022. On October 23rd 1956, in Budapest, 20,000 students and workers gathered around the statue of Jozsef Bem, the hero of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution. The president of the Writers union, Peter Veres, read the manifesto outlining the demands of the protestors- freedom of speech, a more liberal form of socialism, the withdrawal of Soviet troops, Hungarian independence and membership of the United Nations. The Nemzeti Dal, the patriotic poem of Hungary is chanted by the crowds, with the repeating phrase “This we swear, this we swear, that we will no longer be slaves”. By the evening, the Secretary of the Communist Party of Hungary, Erno Gero, would give a speech rejecting the demands of the intelligentsia and the students. Gero’s statement provoked a dramatic response and later that evening the 8 metre tall bronze statue of Joseph Stalin was torn down and replaced b...