Today we have Strategic Vision. Yesterday,We had financial imperatives. And tomorrow morning,We shall have what to do after firing. But today,Today we have Strategic Vision. The quiet girlAt the back suddenly gets excited about a question,And today we have Strategic Vision. This … | Continue reading
Full disclosure: I was one of those academics who, when Wikipedia first appeared, warned students against using it in no uncertain terms. To be fair, in those days most of its articles on ancient history were simply copied from an out-of-copyright edition of the Encyclopaedia Bri … | Continue reading
Woke about half four, as I’m still adjusting to the clocks going back – not helped by the fact that Hector is also clearly having difficulty waiting another hour for breakfast, and is a great deal louder about it. I doze, with Buddy snoring beside me. My thoughts drift towards my … | Continue reading
I sit in a bar in Indianapolis Airport Uncertain and bemused As the rules of American so-called football Really seem very confused… I have missed social media on my US trip rather less than I thought I would, but there’s nothing like having to sit in an airport terminal for three … | Continue reading
I’m not teaching this year, thanks to the magnificent beneficence of the Leverhulme Trust, and so did not have to respond to the latest tendentious mucking-raking fishing expedition from the right-wing gutter press… I’m sorry, I’ll read that again: the latest very legitimate and … | Continue reading
In the unlikely event that anyone is wondering why I’ve been silent on social media this week, despite e.g. the provocations offered by Robert Jenrick’s pronouncements on the impending Bizarre Love Triangle, sorry, impending New Order (decadence klaxon!), it’s because I’m in Bloo … | Continue reading
So, all the books I’ve ever written or edited appear on the LibGen pirate website (among others) – I haven’t bothered to check for books to which I’ve contributed a chapter – and therefore were potentially plagiarised by Anthropic to train its LLM Claude, which has been the subje … | Continue reading
Wake to find that I’m singing Pulp songs in my head. Strange; not the songs I use as a means of trying to get back to sleep in the middle of the night (Sylvia’s Mother, Famous Blue Raincoat and Diamonds and Rust), no reason for thinking of them. Good news is that it’s nearly seve … | Continue reading
If politics is rock music for boring people… I’m getting increasingly annoyed by the frequent use of music analogies to describe the current Labour government. One example from this morning’s Grauniad: “On its worst days, Starmer’s government is akin to a mediocre tribute band pl … | Continue reading
I don’t understand this world any more, #273 in an ongoing series… This is so bizarre that I really wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be fake – if it’s genuine, it suggests that we really are in the final stages of Late Capitalism Will Eat Itself – but there was some disc … | Continue reading
As I’ve mentioned on here before, one of my most treasured possessions for many years was a mug, given to me by a group of ancient history students; white with blue lettering, reading “The simple answer is… we just don’t know”. This gift meant a huge amount to me partly because t … | Continue reading
An interesting addition to the pro-GenAI literature, offering a new analogy for its mysterious powers: Ethan Mollick, ‘On Working With Wizards’. The short version: stop worrying your pretty little head about how it actually works, just marvel at the results, and “Embrace provisio … | Continue reading
‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum’/ Non requirit ut bona dicas. ‘Say nothing but good of the dead’/ Does not require good things to be said. | Continue reading
Wake up with a painful throat. Oh dear, here we go again. Air conditioning in this hotel? People in the train yesterday? People in the audience on Monday? A. had mentioned on Monday evening, as she reminds me, that my glands looked as if they might be up, which would then suggest … | Continue reading
On the one hand, what’s happening in the University of Chicago – the (supposedly temporary) suspension of recruitment to PhD programmes in Classics as well as other disciplines that require serious language learning – is really pretty trivial compared with the closure of programm … | Continue reading
It is of course distressing to realise that demand for my opinions on Thucydides is limited… Just over a fortnight ago I embarked on one of those “One like, one X” social media things on Bluesky, and was initially quite overwhelmed – just as I thought I was starting to catch up w … | Continue reading
“Generative AI tools offer significant opportunities to improve teaching and student learning.” Uh huh. The key question about the new American Historical Association guiding principles on the use of Generative AI in history education is whether they have signed up to the idea th … | Continue reading
Ten years or so ago, I had a business idea. This is not something that often happens – precisely twice in my life, in fact, as my entrepreneurial (aka opportunistic) approach to research ideas doesn’t translate into any sort of comfort with the world of enterprise and profit. How … | Continue reading
Woke from a deep sleep, albeit with very peculiar dreams involving a complicated journey across a city that I can’t place but seems very familiar. It’s the first really good sleep I’ve had for at least a week; back in my own bed, with my own pillow rather than an uncomfortable co … | Continue reading
He looked at the new homepage of the University of Warwick, and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that university senior management teams are no longer even remotely human. It’s not just the excessive use of mauve, or the aversion to definite pronouns, or the vacuous … | Continue reading
Well, I hope that the Roman environmental historians are all set for a bit of public engagement and explanation, because Reform UK, Durham Sturmbannabteilung, has decided to weaponise a bit of ancient history in its campaign against climate action. During a sometimes fractious an … | Continue reading
The grand tour continues. Hello Warszawa! Sorry, Wrocław! Is it time for Thucydides on atheism, or the lessons of history, or powerlessness, or something else entirely? Partly because I talk more happily from notes than reading a prepared text – not least because non-anglophones … | Continue reading
The Panopticon is here, people! At any rate for our youngest cat, the indefatigable Hector. I’m currently on a sort of academic road trip – if it’s Tuesday, it must be Wrocław; what am I supposed to be talking about at this conference..? – and because my wife gets anxious about t … | Continue reading
Groggy. So groggy. I don’t know if this is the result of a really heavy week of work, or the weather, or the small glass of beer I had last night. Slept deeply with strange dreams that I don’t remember. Vaguely heard electronic noises that could be washing machine or lorry revers … | Continue reading
In theory, and at least partly in practice, the fact that I’m on a two-year research fellowship means that I can adopt a somewhat laisser-faire, sufficient unto the day, mañana mañana attitude to aspects of the day job about which I’d normally be getting worked up. Curriculum rev … | Continue reading
The good news is that I slept past half four for first time since we returned from Bulgaria on Friday – having been waking consistently at half six, i.e. half four in British money, for the last few days of the holiday; no inexplicable wakefulness, and no wake-up call from Hector … | Continue reading
The first two hundred metres after they turned off the highway were fine. Then Gregor’s head hit the roof of the car as it reached the end of the decent tarmac and lurched down at least five centimetres with a groan from the suspension. The road surface became a dusty white, with … | Continue reading
In Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, one of my favourite novels of recent years, a mysterious and rather shady acquaintance of the narrator establishes a clinic for people suffering from Alzheimer’s, in which different rooms perfectly recreate the living conditions of previous de … | Continue reading
Unlike Thucydides, we made it to Amphipolis! Yes, I have been waiting over a year to make this joke. Overall, a fantastic day. Partly, it must be said, this was because we started at the Lion of Amphipolis monument (allowing me to develop various theories about its original purpo … | Continue reading
It’s always interesting to realise how much I’ve unconsciously and unquestionably absorbed a set of assumptions. To judge from this week’s visit to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens with my wife, the solitary pre-Hellenic archaeology course I took as an undergraduate – … | Continue reading
Thucydides of course anticipated the dynamics of social media.* On the one hand, there is the democratisation of opinion, with every Athenian citizen having not just a right but a duty to contribute to deliberation in the assembly, with the idea that collective disagreement would … | Continue reading
You can’t spend a lot of time thinking about the modern reception of Thucydides without engaging with his place in Professional Military Education in the United States, which is plausibly responsible for much of his continuing reputation and the frequency of citation on social me … | Continue reading
Thucydides may not be a wholly uncelebrated author, but it is rare that his name occurs in contexts outside politics and history – let alone in poetry or song; and so one of the rarer but not less important missions of this blog is to record such occurrences as do appear from tim … | Continue reading
Woke around six, feeling exceedingly groggy – recovering from very little sleep the previous night, due to getting far too wound up on Friday evening by the need to be coherent and engaging on live radio and then getting talked over. It would have been nice to sleep rather longer … | Continue reading
Ex-Twitter remains a right-wing cesspit – I now visit it solely in order to check on the Thucydides misquotation and misattribution situation, but since one especially deranged and/or trollish QAnon Trumpist has adopted ‘Thucydides’ as his – yes, I’m making assumptions here, but … | Continue reading
There’s been a bit of discussion on Bluesky this morning of the latest lot of advertising from the latest GenAI-based start-up, Cluely. It’s interesting mainly for its predictability and obviousness; aspiring to the perfect rearrangement of all the usual clichés, which could of c … | Continue reading
It is not a new or startling observation that the current regime in the USA is better characterised as a royal court than a modern state. More could be said, however, about the importance in such courts of competition for status, often taking bizarre forms – the 15th- and 16th-ce … | Continue reading
The dominant tendency in historical studies over the last fifty years or so has been to assume rationality on the part of people in the past, even if their behaviour and ideas seem at first sight to be ridiculous, inexplicable or ‘primitive’ by our standards. The core argument of … | Continue reading
Tl;dr: massively over-interpreting a throwaway comment and extending a metaphor way beyond any reasonable point… Should our primary goal as ancient historians be to rescue our field, perhaps by trying to shake off the embarrassing legacies of ‘Classics’ and then infiltrating hist … | Continue reading
Woke from a deep, largely dreamless sleep at seven on the dot – which is six in British money, but still represents a significant improvement over the regular weekday alarm time of half five and the regular weekday cat-demanding-breakfast time of five, let alone the total lack of … | Continue reading
Over the last year or so, like other academics, I’ve received occasional emails from different publishers asking whether I’d be willing for my work to be included in any deal they might sign with GenAI companies to make their publications available as training data. I do apprecia … | Continue reading
I am reasonably confident that my little brother does not read this blog, and nor does anyone who is likely to mention it to him. This is important, because I wouldn’t want him to think I was ungrateful for the birthday present he bought me last week – but I do want to talk about … | Continue reading
As the apeirokinetic pantoustasis rolls ever onward, it is increasingly clear that this must be the darkest timeline.* It is at any rate the stupidest. Reason, analysis and theory have little purchase on events, leading only into a dark place of aporia and despair – even if you c … | Continue reading
The name of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff recurred time and again in the conference on Altertumswissenschaft and Historismus I was attending last week in London (one of the most intellectually stimulating conferences I’ve been to in recent years, despite my sleep deprivation … | Continue reading
There are times when a good night’s sleep is even more of an absolute necessity than usual. As a chronic insomniac who lives with three deranged and demanding cats, I’m used to getting by on the basis of less-than-deep-and-satisfying rest and not enough of it – but ideally not wh … | Continue reading
I’m trying to find the sweet spot between a transhistorical, universalising claim along the lines of Thucydides’ “most people do not take the trouble to enquire critically but believe any old crap” and a short-term ahistorical catastrophising claim about social media having rotte … | Continue reading
I am almost entirely failing at the moment to live up to the model of some of my heroes: to be able to keep thinking and writing, to maintain the equanimity required to make proper sense of the world rather than falling back on clichés and polemic, to draw strength from one’s val … | Continue reading
Could we please stop with the relentless politicisation of ancient history? The past should not be deployed in a superficial and tendentious manner by someone with no understanding of historical research, all to support a wholly contemporary agenda intended to make Britons feel b … | Continue reading