Posted in Musings, tagged Brexit, games on June 9, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Two apposite remarks on the Twitter this morning. David Henig (@DavidHenigUK) noted the current Brexit paradox (which might easily be added to my ongoing collection of fragments of Zeno of Elea) that prospective Tory leadership candidates compete for the role of delivering Brexit by adopting positions that make it ever less likely that Brexit could actually be delivered; he’s responding to a thread by Simon Usherwood (@Usherwood) that includes the comment that “a more useful way to do this would be one of those fables, where the king sets the suitors a task in order to win the hand of the princess: results before reward”. For some reason this idea is then dismissed as impractical. Is it really? (more…)
Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged Impact, Melian Dialogue, politics, power, teaching, Thucydides on June 8, 2019| Leave a Comment »
This week is especially heavy on travelling, which is terrible for doing all the writing I imagined I’d get done once marking was out of the way, pretty terrible for my waistline as I resort too often to coffee and cake to keep going, moderately good for starting to work through the long list of overdue book reviews, and very good for blog posts. I’m currently, in theory, on my way to Zagreb for a doctoral workshop on pre-modern economics [update, three hours later: finally on the move…] On Tuesday I was in Manchester, and on Wednesday in London, for teacher-training sessions for the ‘Understanding Power’ project – aka ‘Thinking Through Thucydides’, but that name isn’t going to pull in the punters – that Lynette Mitchell and I have been developing with the Politics Project.
This was tiring, a little stressful – and finally a joy. (more…)
Posted in Musings, Publications, tagged classical reception, history, international relations, military strategy, tragedy on June 4, 2019| Leave a Comment »
I’ve just had a review published on War On The Rocks (a reliably interesting website for analysis of foreign policy and strategy, from a viewpoint that is predominantly US-focused and frequently Realist), on the new book by Hal Brands and Charles Edel, The Lessons of Tragedy: statecraft and world order (Yale UP, 2019). As you can probably gather from the review, I found this rather an odd experience; indeed, half-way through the book I became increasingly convinced that I was a completely unsuitable reviewer, as after the first couple of chapters the ‘tragedy’ element largely disappeared, and B & E’s conclusion is not that US strategy people all need to start reading tragedy (that might be fun…), but that they need to review more recent history in the alleged spirit of tragic sensibility, which largely boils down to an assumption that bad things will continue to happen. (more…)
Posted in Musings, tagged quotations, Thucydides on May 30, 2019| 2 Comments »
“Knowledge without understanding is useless.” Duh. It’s exactly the sort of banal truism that excites my paranoia; the idea isn’t important, but rather what someone making such a statement then wants to do about it. You could deploy it in opposition to rote learning, and the idea that there’s a list of Essential Facts and Dates that every child ought to know by heart, to argue for a focus on analysis and interpretation. But you could also – and this comes to mind with the publication this week of a new report on post-18 education in the UK, with implications for the health of the whole university system – deploy it in an attack on high-falutin’ book learning in general, or on studies that aren’t directly engaged with the Real World – it depends on whether you imagine that understanding comes through the acquisition of knowledge, or derives from a separate source (practical experience, ideology, religion…) which is independent of actually knowing things. (more…)
Posted in Musings, tagged academia, Writing on May 11, 2019| Leave a Comment »
I’m doing the final polish of this piece while wondering why watching Meet Me In St Louis seemed like a good idea – THIS is one of the classic movie musicals?!? – and ignoring the cats, who are NOT getting fed until half eight. It was sketched out last week, between rewatching Independence Day (far superior to Meet Me In St Louis despite lack of songs and some common themes), then drafted in between cooking vindaloo and chana masala, sitting on the train into work, and eating homemade muffin (proper English muffin) while being yelled at by cats who want to be let outside to intimidate the local wildlife. (more…)
