Something even weirder than normal is happening on Thucydides Twitter. I hesitate to use the word ‘invasion’ because of its association with the UK government’s racist anti-migrant rhetoric, but certainly I feel like a scientist in the opening act of one of those movies, puzzled … | Continue reading
The History of Ancient Rome, Definitively De-Woked; free from excessive emphasis on imperialism, colonialism and class struggle. Rome must be considered one of the most successful things in history. In the course of centuries Rome grew from a small town on the Tiber River into a … | Continue reading
he hand on the arm (or in this case the naked calf): affectionate, reassuring – or restraining, controlling, possessive? The expression that we can see on the face of the hand’s owner (the other face is turned away from us and invisible): peaceful and content, or smugly arrogant, … | Continue reading
If Elon Musk is going to destroy the Bird Site, inadvertently or not – the reported wheeze that everyone will get a timeline prioritising tweets from $8/month ‘verified’ users suggests he doesn’t have the faintest idea what makes it great for many people – I am hoping that he eit … | Continue reading
I seem to have been writing quite a lot of confidential reviews lately, of article submissions, grant applications and cases for promotion (way to make almost everyone a little bit paranoid…), and so I was intrigued by the news that a journal in the sciences, eLife, has decided t … | Continue reading
Our regular comfort rewatching of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is ar a fairly early stage, but there have been times over the last week and a half, with another bout of COVID now turning into a lingering cold colliding with the second week of teaching and the final stages of putting … | Continue reading
Events of the present and future will tend to resemble those of the past – or however else you want to paraphrase Thucydides’ key assumption about the usefulness of his work – or at any rate will remind us of them. This week has been very much a case in point, as commentators hav … | Continue reading
Okay, this is a first for me; I’ve just produced a new episode of the Thucydiocy podcast (Podbean link here; iTunes always takes longer to process), without it being based on a previous blog post. As I tend to use the blog as a repository in case I need to check up on misattribut … | Continue reading
Yes, it’s been a quiet month on here. Too much heat for my liking; a lot of time spent watering the chillis and aubergines in the greenhouse as a result; and [whispering very quietly so the gods don’t hear] I have actually been feeling slightly more myself at last, so have actual … | Continue reading
What should an academic career in the humanities look like today – beyond “not like this”? The question is prompted in the short term by the fact that Mary Beard, to mark her retirement, has taken the opportunity to promote discussion of the academic precariat and the extent to w … | Continue reading
The continuing joys of Long COVID… The main function of this blog post is just to give a link to a profound and thought-provoking piece by the ever-wonderful Maria Farrell over at Crooked Timber, talking about her experience of living with and adapting to ME/CFS, with an eye to t … | Continue reading
And so farewell then, the Thucydiocy Podcast. In seven episodes, stretched out irregularly over several years, you established in mind-numbing detail the different ways in which people have misattributed things to Thucydides, to an audience of many tens of people, two of whom onc … | Continue reading
I am not, I would like to think, an unreasonable Luddite. I suppose it could be said that what I am is at best inconsistent; sometimes not a Luddite at all, indeed sometimes the sort of middle-aged man who desperately strives to keep up with odd bits of the technological Zeitgeis … | Continue reading
It’s always nice to learn that someone has found something you did a while ago useful – yes, I know there are giants in the field who get thoroughly sick of being told how they’ve transformed the understanding and indeed life philosophy of another dozen junior scholars this month … | Continue reading
There is a small, rather marginal community, struggling to survive in the face of the pressures of the modern world, heavily dependent on attracting tourists. There is a series of odd and sometimes alarming occurrences, which most people ignore – but a few argue that there is a p … | Continue reading
Ah, the brand. The backbone of all that we do, the foundation of international success, the very heart of the institution. It’s not enough to produce excellent teaching and research if your logo fails to communicate your core values in just the wrong shade of green. But things co … | Continue reading