Socrates and Galen on the Great British Bake Off
As the national girth expands by the second, Auntie, never backward about lecturing us on the topic, continues to glory…
John McDonnell’s true economic guru: the emperor Nero
John McDonnell, shadow chancellor in the Corbynite splinter-group, has announced that £120 billion is waiting to be reclaimed from tax…
Cicero on Labour taxes
Heidi Alexander, Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow health secretary, has emphasised how important it is ‘to weave into [Labour’s] language, our narrative…
Corbyn’s democracy
The virtuous Mr Corbyn is insisting that New Old Labour should return to its traditional republican ways and take decisions…
The relative experience of consuls and Corbyn
One of the justifications of the House of Lords is that it embodies ‘collective experience’. That is not a quality…
Livy on immigration policy
In the migration crisis, the EU is currently acting just like the ancients, as if border controls did not exist,…
Corbyn and the plebs
Last week, guru Corbyn was invited to reflect on the 2,500-year-old Roman origins of the republicanism to which he is…
Just how republican is Jeremy Corbyn?
True to his antique, bearded ideology, guru Corbyn is a ‘republican’, a form of government invented 2,500 years ago. ‘Republic’…
Tacitus on Edward Heath
The press and police have been condemned for the way they fall on mere rumour and plaster it across the…
Boris’s waiting game
While the Labour party rakes over its past in an effort to find a policy for its future, the commentators…
Party-naming with Plato
In order to make a sensible choice of new leader, the Labour party is trying to work out what its…
Jeremy Corbyn’s world
Jeremy Corbyn says he is very excited about his campaign to become Labour leader because lots of young people are…
Vespasian vs Islamic State
As Ahmed Rashid argued last week, it is hard to see what the West is doing in the Middle East,…
On Wimbledon grunters
What a pleasure it was to watch the men’s final at Wimbledon contested with a minimum of grunting, exclaiming and…
Tsipras vs hubris
The EU finds it difficult to understand what drives the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Quite simply, he is a…
Solon vs Jean-Claude Juncker
The combination of terror and outrage with which Brussels has greeted Greek Prime Minister Tsipras’s referendum tells us everything we…
Hesiod on Grexit anxiety
Why do Greeks want to keep the euro, or remain in the European Union? The combative, creative, competitive, mercantile classical…
Aristotle on the Lego chair
So Cambridge University has accepted £4 million from the makers of Lego (snort) to fund a Lego chair (Argos sells…
The game of survival
Apparently Fifa emperor Sepp Blatter received a ten-minute standing ovation from his 400 staff when he addressed them after his…
Pliny the Younger on Fifa
In any huge enterprise (like Fifa), where does the rot begin? Pliny the Younger mused on this question in a…
The northern powerhouses of ancient Turkey
Government claims that it will ‘free’ northern cities to turn themselves into ‘powerhouses’. Since most of them are held by…
The Roman trade unions
With Len McCluskey, general secretary of the union Unite, keen to ensure ‘his’ members choose the next Labour leader, and…
Cicero’s advice for election-losers
The great Robert Harris has defended the pollsters who got the elections so wrong by quoting Cicero on the electorate’s…
Coalitions of the willing
Whatever the result of the election, it has become clearer by the day that our ‘democracy’ is run by politicians…
Start-up culture in Ancient Greece
Honduras wants to establish start-up cities to experiment with alternative economic, regulatory, and legal systems. Could this concept help stop…
