Examining the Cultural Significance of Purple

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If ever there was an argument against innate ideas, purple might be it. Never has a colour held such differing, even opposing connotations across cultures and centuries, which might make writing this column a little trickier than usual. We could start at the beginning, or close to it, with the honorific title Porphyrogenitus, translating as ‘born in the purple’, given to those privileged babies born to a man after he had become an emperor in the Byzantine empire.…