Ah, history. To quote Catherine Morland, “I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.” The reasons are familiar: not just a tendency to focus on content rather than form, as if the two can be separated, but also a determination to deny or obscure its invented nature by being as dull as possible. And even as some professional historiography has become more interesting and adventurous in its techniques of representation, history written for students or for a general audience defaults time and again to good old-fashioned naive realism, with predictable results. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Mary Beard’
Fables of the Reconstruction
Posted in Musings, tagged historical narrative, history, Mary Beard, television on November 2, 2018| 3 Comments »
In (Partial) Defence of Arron Banks
Posted in Musings, tagged Arron Banks, historiography, Late Antiquity, Later Roman Empire, Mary Beard, migration, technology on December 7, 2016| Leave a Comment »
I should say from the beginning that this is not the sort of defence of Arron Banks that’s likely to carry much weight with any hypothetical future popular tribunal considering charges of willful destruction of the prosperity and well-being of the British people. Further, my immediate reaction to his original “True the Roman Empire was effectively destroyed by immigration” tweet was a typical kneejerk academic one – something along the lines of “yes, why don’t we revive Tenney Frank’s ‘Race Mixture in the Roman Empire’ while we’re at it?” – followed by an attempt at getting #BanksHistory trending on Twitter, and I don’t think that was entirely wrong. At the same time, there is something about the way that the battlelines in Banks versus Beard ended up being neatly drawn between ‘ignorant right-wing billionaire combining memories of schoolboy history and Gladiator with current ideological prejudices’ and ‘heroic authoritative Professor just fighting for Truth’ that makes me feel a little uncomfortable.* (more…)
Honouring Mary Beard
Posted in Events, tagged Mary Beard on July 20, 2012| Leave a Comment »
Mary Beard has been a supporter of Classics & Ancient History in Bristol for years (she’s a Vice-President of the Institute for Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition), and so we were delighted to grab the opportunity – before everyone else starts doing it – of honouring her work as a scholar and public intellectual through the award of an honourary DLitt yesterday. You can read her own account of the experience here; the two things I’d add are that, as the Vice Chancellor himself noted, no graduand of any kind has ever tried to kiss the VC before (I think we can expect that anecdote to appear in future iterations of his traditional Graduation speech), and that I’ve never seen an honourary graduand look so positively joyful (normally they’re much too busy being solemn).
Sphinx 