Sphinx

So, when I announced my Exeter inaugural lecture a few weeks ago, I was persuaded to arrange for it to be recorded, for everyone who wasn’t in a position to trek down to Devon on a Thursday evening. It has turned out to be surprisingly and annoyingly difficult to make this happen, but we have the technology…

This is offered to the general public with the usual caveat that it was written far too hastily while trying to do too many other things at the same time, and so it would have been much better if delivered in different circumstances; and the slightly less usual caveats that (1) it was recorded from the very top of a rather weird, extremely precipitous lecture theatre, which is why you mostly see the top of my head from a steep angle, and (2) my watch was ever so slightly slow, so my brilliant timing actually meant that the recording cuts off literally seconds before the end. My actual final words went something like:

…the epitome of the humanities academic, with the usual “yes but actually it’s much more complicated than that” spiel. Thucydides is above all the man who knows how to ask the right questions, and who tries to teach us to do the same. If we live in a Thucydidean world, it’s not because he’s an all-seeing prophet or infallible social scientist, but because we still haven’t learnt to ask the right questions consistently.

But the most annoying thing of all is that I’d come up with a really good line, in a piece I was writing for the magazine of the Einstein Foundation that generously supports my current collaboration with colleagues in Berlin, and then forgot to use it… Will have to save it for another occasion.