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Posts Tagged ‘historiography’

Poetic Licence

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on June 24, 2019| 2 Comments »

One of the interesting dynamics of Twitter is the way that it encourages imitation and development: predictive text games, variations on memes, daft hashtags etc, not all of which are designed to get you to reveal personal information that can then be applied to hacking your bank account. It’s one of the more joyful aspects of a platform that can at times be very depressing.

I think this explains why I sometimes have a similar response to things on Twitter that aren’t actually posted to provoke imitation (more…)

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Time Bandits

Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged , , , on October 30, 2018| 2 Comments »

Thucydides is The Most Fabulous Author In The World. I don’t mean this as a compliment, but rather as an evocation of Terry Gilliam’s wonderful film Time Bandits, in which a motley band of dwarves and an 11-year-old boy called Kevin – you know, it has only just occurred to me, thirty-seven years later, that this is a snarky Hobbit reference – embark on a quest to find The Most Fabulous Object In The World, concealed in the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness (which of course demonstrates its desirability). The two key attributes of this Object are, firstly, that everyone sees it differently, as suits their own conception of Fabulousness, and, secondly, that the whole set-up is a trap. (more…)

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Tight Fit

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , on September 17, 2018| 3 Comments »

If I ever want to write a distillation of the political wisdom and insights of Thucydides that will get noticed by serious newspapers and sold in proper bookshops, it’s clear that I’m going to have to develop an eye-catching binary distinction with which to make sense of the entire world, the equivalent of the Nowheres and the Somewheres, or the Tight and Loose cultures distinguished by a social psychology study that claims to “provide a consistent way of understanding differences observed from antiquity to the present day, in everything from international relations to relations in our homes.” Hmm. The Thucydides and the Thucydidose? The Thucydiscerning and the Thucydiots? The people who believe in reductionist binary distinctions with universal validity, and everybody else? (more…)

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The Uncertainty Principle

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , on February 19, 2018| 1 Comment »

The physicist Werner Heisenberg opens Der Teil und das Ganze (1969; published in English as Physics and Beyond in 1971), his personal account of the development of atomic physics in the first half of the twentieth century, with a citation from Thucydides; 1.22.1, to be precise (more…)

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Why Thucydides Hated Medieval History

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on January 28, 2018| 2 Comments »

There’s a very peculiar article in today’s Observer, picking up on the predictably gormless comments earlier this week from Robert Halfon, chair of the Commons Select Committee on Education, about medieval history being fine for those who want to pay for such a luxury but undeserving of public support. To be precise, most of the article is great, as it’s based around eminently sensible comments from medieval historians like Miri Rubin and John Arnold, but the opening paragraphs are really odd.

Historians have been ridiculed since Herodotus, the “father of history”, was mocked by his Athenian contemporary, Thucydides, as a mere storyteller. So it was with some weariness that medieval historians took to their keyboards last week to respond to the latest slur against their discipline.

Robert Halfon, who chairs the Commons select committee on education, is no Thucydides, but he echoed complaints down the ages when he singled out medieval historians as undeserving of public funding.

Okay… (more…)

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Diversitas et Multiculturalismus

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , on August 2, 2017| 49 Comments »

This isn’t the Summer of Love; it may be the Summer of Bad-Tempered Arguments About Classics and Racism. Over in the US, Sarah Bond‘s articles on the ‘white-washing’ of classical statues – that is, why do we think of them in terms of gleaming white marble when they were actually painted? – have provoked a furious backlash from the far right, including death threats.* In the UK, an alt-right blogger objected to the fact that a BBC educational cartoon on life in Roman Britain included black people – “I mean, who cares about historical accuracy, right?” – and was carefully schooled by @MikeStuchbery_, Matthew Nicholls from Reading, Mary Beard and others – with the result that Mary, at least, now seems to be spending six hours a day responding to people on Twitter about this.

What is surprising about these two arguments is that the substantive issues – ancient statues were painted, the Roman Empire (including Britain) was ethnically diverse – are such old hat. (more…)

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Chimes at Midnight

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on March 10, 2017| Leave a Comment »

We must be old. We cannot choose but be old. We have heard the chimes at midnight at the the end of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme music – twenty years ago? It was a simpler time, when one girl (albeit with supernatural strength) and her friends could avert the apocalypse, time and again, because the apocalypse was a bunch of demons trying to open a gateway to hell, or the mayor of a small town trying to turn himself into a demon, not an entire global system of doom. Even as the threats became more powerful and apparently unstoppable – deranged hellgods, a rogue military experiment, sexually frustrated adolescent boys – they remained identifiable, nameable, and ultimately susceptible to the judicious application of violence. If only… (more…)

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