It is deeply uncomfortable to admit, but there is truth in the old claim that one becomes more conservative with age. This isn’t a ‘bit’, burnishing my credentials for an application to become Director of one of the new Centres for Western Civilization that seem to be popping up … | Continue reading
How is it August already? It’s not that I got nothing done last month, but too much time was absorbed by online meetings, online chats, reading lengthy and often mendacious documents from management and just trying to process what’s happening at the university – above all, the se … | Continue reading
Like any self-respecting scholar of classical antiquity, I have Opinions about Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey, even if I haven’t seen it yet. (1) Obviously the most important aspect of any such adaptation is how it relates to my own specialist field, so I was delighted to see a … | Continue reading
This will be a shorter newsletter than usual, so I’m glad that I’m not attempting to charge anyone for it… Long-standing readers of this blog, especially those who stuck with the ‘Twelve Days in the Year’ series, will be aware that I’ve been struggling for some years with chronic … | Continue reading
Dear germs colleagues, I acknowledge receipt of your interminable diatribe letter. As your Supreme Plenipotentiary I am of course conscious of the anxiety that these entirely indispensable exterminations regrettable redundancies may be causing you. I and the rest of the senior ma … | Continue reading
In the good old days before GenAI, anxieties about student plagiarism sometimes focused on essay mills, where one could buy bespoke essays on whatever topic was needed, complete with references and bibliography, TOTALLY UNDETECTABLE by plagiarism software (though obviously that’s … | Continue reading
I’ve never been convinced by the ‘seven stages of grief’ thing, even after they’ve come up with assorted workarounds and cheats to deal with the lack of empirical evidence to support the model as originally proposed (you now don’t have to go through the stages in order, apparentl … | Continue reading
[The other Neville Morley, Supreme President In Chief of Ex University on Earth 2, has a further bulletin.] Earlier this year we introduced a new training course in Corporate Conscience, compulsory for anyone we thought had the potential to cause us trouble. I am aware that some … | Continue reading
[The Neville Morley of Earth 2 developed a brief stint as Faculty Education Director into a full-blown managerial career, rapidly progressing via Head of School and Dean to Pro-Vice Chancellor for Student Mollification. He then embarked on a series of senior appointments at diffe … | Continue reading
Whenever one of my lectures covers the topic of Greco-Roman agriculture, I always include the ‘Aristophanes the Astrologer’ passage from Agathias Scholasticus – it may be 6th century CE, but it expresses a timeless reality that speaks to the countless generations of Norfolk tenan … | Continue reading
If, as Douglas Adams argued, the interconnection of all matter means you can extrapolate the entire universe from a single piece of fairy-cake, then it is certainly plausible that you can take the temperature of global culture by sampling its outputs. There is then the Ozymandias … | Continue reading
Every crisis is an opportunity, and the collapse of higher education in the West is no exception; not only are there lucrative opportunities in consultancy and advising senior management on how to grind down their staff and destroy their institutions, but this in turn creates a m … | Continue reading
As I’ve noted on here before, I was a fairly terrible student, at least for my first two years; too busy with music and writing and sport and student union stuff, and drinking substantially too much, and having a succession of unrequited crushes (which did fuel the music, to be f … | Continue reading
Tl;dr: it would be really good to get some feedback on the future direction of this blog… “It seemed like a good idea at the time”. I have sometimes reflected that this is one possible epitaph for my academic career, if not my life (which has been largely quite sensible and risk- … | Continue reading
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I have finally – five months late, and at least three and a half months since I sincerely thought I was nearly finished – completed the draft of a chapter on ‘Conservatism and the Classical’. The delay is partly due to the usual problems of lack of energy, lack of sleep, ongoing … | Continue reading
The yelling starts some time around four. Hector has plenty of food, and a clean litter tray; if this was a one-off it might be attributed to a bad dream, and he just wants a bit of reassurance, but the fact it’s now happened several days in succession means it can only be that i … | Continue reading
Maybe it’s because I’ve had a week’s holiday, including some nights when I actually slept soundly and didn’t have too many bizarre dreams, so I’m full of energy and enthusiasm that will dissipate as soon as work kicks in again – but I’ve decided to start a fortnightly newsletter. … | Continue reading
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Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives is deservedly one of the classic books for children. The plot is straightforward: boy comes to big city for the first time to stay with relatives, is robbed on the train of the money his mother had given him, follows the suspected thief and … | Continue reading
Buried somewhere in my ‘future projects if it ever turns out that I am still capable of writing stuff’ list is writing a piece on ‘decadence as/and political theory’, developing various ideas that I’ve sketched out in some more general chapters and which underpin a hitherto-unsuc … | Continue reading
Another good piece by Henry Farrell this week, reflecting on the chronopolitics of the Singularity Bros. Everything in their discourse, and all their policy prescriptions, are determined by the confident assumption that Artificial General Intelligence and machine consciousness, a … | Continue reading
Slept heavily with strange dreams; some sort of university complex as ever, full of staircases and corridors, lacking any sort of predictable structure, which I walk nervously through with a constant feeling I’m not supposed to be there – this is all a bit obvious, isn’t it? This … | Continue reading
Thucydides invented friction-maxxing. His work holds out the promise of deep insight into the way the world works, offering understanding not just of past events but, through that, of present and future developments as well. ‘The human thing’ means there are common threads and pa … | Continue reading
Bluesky was down for a fair chunk of one day last week, at any rate round here, with rumours that this was down to them using GenAI to write code for the site. Now that it’s back, the first two things that caught my eye next morning were both GenAI-related; a story about a UK […] | Continue reading
I’ve been re-watching the first series of The X-Files, for a lunchtime break when the weather is too unpleasant to hang out by the pond, and what has really struck me – besides being reminded of how brilliant the relevant episode of The Simpsons was – is the total lack of ambigui … | Continue reading
An interesting, though extremely trivial, coincidence: this morning I was vaguely contemplating the choice between Thucydides and Tacitus as guides to contemporary politics, C16-17 and today, and then a little later posted on social media about an exciting new example of utterly … | Continue reading
I’m delighted to announce that I have a new job. Who teaches the teachers? I’m old enough to have preceded the introduction of mandatory ‘TLHE’ qualifications for new university lecturers, let alone for postgrads; my education as a teacher was a chaotic mixture of observation of … | Continue reading
Observation changes the thing being observed; I wake up (early as ever; it’s still very dark out) and start wondering about how to write about today. Yes, this is supposed to be a careful record, accurate to the point of banality, of what happens in the course of the day, not doi … | Continue reading
One of the many unfortunate consequences of current developments in the Persian Gulf* is an impending shortage of titles for blog posts.** The long-standing tradition of The Sphinx is that I generally name posts after songs – I can’t remember why, other than a wilful refusal to p … | Continue reading
There was a conversation on Bluesky earlier this week about the experience of reading a great bit of research in your field from a few years ago, wondering what the author had done since, and finding that they had in fact since left academia after failing to get a permanent posit … | Continue reading
My normal approach to writing these journal entries is to make rough notes every so often in the course of the day, sometimes writing sections up in a bit more detail when I really don’t want to forget something. I’m so tired today that I keep getting distracted, completely forge … | Continue reading
Apparently there is now a gimmick on Grammarly which, if you upload an academic paper, offers you feedback and suggestions on it from a selection of relevant scholars – the example I saw on social media, for a piece on the medieval Mediterranean, included the options of Chris Wic … | Continue reading
Clearly the AI bots that generate flattering messages to authors as a prelude to scamming them have run out of worthwhile targets, as I’ve just received one. It’s sensible enough not to claim that a book club is keen to engage with Classics: Why It Matters, but offers several par … | Continue reading
A basic fact of student feedback, certainly in any class bigger than ten or so, is that there will always be at least one gratuitously negative and basically unfair response. Sometimes that student will go to the trouble of writing quite extensive comments – which tend to confirm … | Continue reading
Reflections on having added yet another entry to the ‘Misattributed’ section of the Thucydides Wikiquote page… One of my regular complaints is that many of these quotes persist because they are disseminated, or not corrected, by people who really ought to know better. Take the st … | Continue reading
It’s time to get ahead of the media story. Thucydides has nothing to hide, and is completely committed to transparency. While there has been speculation about a distant family connection to Pericles, there is no intimate relationship between them that would in any way compromise … | Continue reading
It’s half past seven, and this is already one of those days that are probably best forgotten as soon as possible. Slept okay until about four, and then managed to doze fitfully, fighting off panicky thoughts of work (and, for some reason, a persistent earworm of Adele’s version o … | Continue reading
Once upon a time, the internet was all about hyperlinks. My first webpage, back in 1994-5, was roughly 40% links to other people’s pages about stuff I liked (if I recall correctly, an eclectic mixture of topics like chocolate, chillis and the lyrics of Bob Dylan), and other peopl … | Continue reading
Once again we find Thucydides at the heart of tangled questions of war, diplomacy and politics, power, life and death. I’m not thinking of Trump’s claim to Greenland/Iceland/Saarland/Greendale/delete as appropriate, or Mark Carney’s bid to claim the (currently dormant) title of M … | Continue reading
Despite any scurrilous rumours you may have heard, I do not in fact advocate for everyone to be compelled to read Thucydides. On the contrary, I’d be more easily persuaded of the need to introduce a short proficiency test as a prequisite for being allowed to read it – though clea … | Continue reading
I am a little surprised at the more or less total lack of discussion amongst classical reception folks on here of the third episode of the new series of Fallout, given that one of the major plot strands involves the appearance of Caesar’s Legion as one of the various violent fact … | Continue reading
There’s nothing like a would-be strongman with poor impulse control throwing his weight (and, more significantly, his country’s weight) around on the international stage to bring out the Thucydides quoters on social media. 80% Melian Dialogue – the ‘gangstas rule, suckas suffer’ … | Continue reading
And now the end is near – of the blogging year, of course. It’s traditional for me to shake my head despairingly at this point, wondering whether it’s all worth it, but actually I feel in a pretty good place at the moment as far as the blog is concerned. Viewing and visitor figur … | Continue reading
As ever, one of the fun aspects of end-of-year reflection is revisiting the blog posts, articles and other internet things that I noted down in the course of the year as worth revisiting – sorry, I had another bad night and my sentence-writing gland is sluggish. This is of course … | Continue reading
Dreadful night; dropped off fine, then after an hour or so the cats started – to be strictly accurate, Hector and Olga started, running around the house like mad things and dropping the rubber ball down the stairs in order to chase it and then bring it back to the top to start ag … | Continue reading
One of the minor unexpected consequences of having a playlist of gentle, mostly piano trio jazz tracks designed to help me relax and drop off to sleep, that sometimes gets left on all night, is that it completely skews end-of-year listening stats. The number of quiet piano trio p … | Continue reading
Have we not learnt to double-check all references? Especially in this new era of bullshitting machines? This afternoon, Naomi Scott (@drnaomiscott.bsky.social) posted on Bluesky that she’d just been reading the really wild Wikipedia page for Euripides’ lost tragedy Thyestes. And, … | Continue reading