Sphinx

Death. Death. Crisis. Death. Crisis. Death. Death. That was 2016, that was. Good riddance, apart from the uneasy feeling that it may have been just the overture, and next year we won’t have the all-too-brief comic relief of England v. Iceland to cheer us up.

It’s all been very serious German novel. One of the themes on the blog this year has been the avoidance, if not fervent denunciation, of crass historical analogies, so I’ll save my next discussion of Volker Kutscher’s excellent Krimi series set in 1920s and 1930s Berlin [pervasive atmosphere of impending doom and dramatic irony] until the Tom Tykwer adaptation starts next year, by which time I may have caught up with the latest volume. Rather, I’ve been reminded all too often of Jenny Erpenbeck’s brilliant Aller Tage Abend (and I still dislike the English title End of Days without having a good alternative suggestion), in which the central character dies again and again – as a baby, as a teenager, at various stages of adulthood – with a constant dialectic between the hopeful counterfactual (if only this, then she would have lived…) and the inevitability of death, against a backdrop of twentieth-century horrors. That was 2016, that was…

The fashion in blogs these days appears to be the celebration of the ‘most read’ posts of the year. I don’t think I’m being completely perverse in offering instead a review that focuses on my favourites, which have often been the least read. I can think of at least three different reasons for this. Firstly, the sheer randomness of which posts get picked up by the wider world, which seems to depend largely on whether Tom Holland or Brad DeLong happen to notice them and get annoyed or interested by something – most of the credit for this blog hitting 16,000 visitors this year goes to them. Secondly, many of my favourite posts are also the most personal ones, which I tend to sneak out without bothering to advertise them. Thirdly, I have a terrible idea what my readers may actually want to read…

January Looking back over my posts, I realise that one of the dominant trends of 2016 was sitting there in plain view from the beginning: death. I concluded 2015 with a tribute to Christopher Brooke; I began 2016 with tributes to Geoffrey Hawthorn and Ellen Meiksins Wood, and started praying fervently that the Grim Reaper would lay off any more significant intellectual influences. He did (well, apart from Umberto Eco the following month); he moved on to musicians instead… Still, I did find time for a gratuitous intervention in the Rhodes Must Fall controversy, arguing for a proper bit of Damnatio Memoriae rather than all this pussy-footing around with just removing statues.

February was, from a professional perspective, perhaps my lowest point since some of the darker days of the PhD. As an eldest child with a massively over-developed supergo, I have always been a Good Boy, obsessively keeping to the rules and trying to satisfy those in authority, and so it was a bit of a shock when my line manager decided that getting a reasonably prestigious visiting fellowship in Berlin was a Bad Thing – because why should I be working for some other university when Bristol is paying my salary? – and that my wish to take up the opportunity was grounds for disciplinary action. The basic lesson, still valid even if expressed in code: if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone, It Could Be You. Rather more cheerful – but in the circumstances also self-consciously defiant – were my reflections on language and translation, in Bridge of Spies and the excellent German translation of Anthony Powell, in Eine Frage der Erziehung.

March The first signs of what was to become a recurrent, deeply annoying theme this year: endless citation of random and generally trivial historical analogies, to at best rhetorical effect. Is Trump the New Catiline? Or Nero, or Cleon, or Caesar, or Crassus, or Alcibiades, or Gracchus, or Agamemnon..? This doesn’t help – as I think subsequent events have shown… Other than that, the first in what will be an annual plea to change my title to Professor of Ancient Hxtory, and what proved to be a depressingly prescient discussion of how the Melian Dialogue tells us that Project Fear was not going to win the Brexit debate.

April seemed to become Melian Dialogue month, with some thoughts prompted by the publication of my loose adaptation in Disclaimer magazine, and a reconstruction of the little-known first Melian Dialogue, in which the Melians turned up in Athens during the Persian Wars and insisted on leaving the alliance. But there was also the post that has probably now shot into the Top Ten posts of the year for views in the last two days, thanks to the patronage of the aforementioned Holland, in which data from the Thucydiocy Bot suggested (to me, anyway) that we may have reached the Singularity without noticing, and that the new superintelligence speaks Thucydides.

May was rather a dark, exhausted and unproductive month, with just two posts: a quick rant about B. Johnson’s use of classical analogies in the Brexit debate, and some musings on the Five Stages of Job Rejection (the main reason for May being exhausting…) in response to @elliemackin – somewhat undercut (but not much less true, I think) by the fact that I was in the end successful, and could look forward to Getting The Hell Out of Bristol and a Head of School who thought that co-supervising a doctoral student at another university was equivalent to pilfering the office supplies cupboard and embezzling the coffee fund…

June Oh dear. Between the Scylla of gratuitous classical analogies and the Charybdis of post -Brexit despair, it was a struggle to find any consolation in history; a theme I plan to return to in the spring, linking Thucydides’ scepticism about hope and the human propensity to making really terrible decisions to his desperate efforts to combat pre- and post-truth politics… Still, I did offer an account of Kutscher’s early Berlin novels, as well as an idea for a Thucydides gameshow that has, bizarrely, not yet been taken up by any television production companies…