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…
Plutarch and Aristotle vs Lynton Crosby
Attack Ed Miliband and sing up the long-term economic plan: that is the now obviously useless scheme devised by the…
Demosthenes vs Michael Fallon
Secretary of State for Defence Michael Fallon’s claim that Ed Miliband, having practised on his brother, would also stab his…
Voting for heroes
To judge from elections, the purpose of politics is to win power by promising to make people better off. Plato,…
Caesar, Pompey and the SNP
Alex Salmond, the ex-first minister who proved incapable of making Scotland independent, has assured the world that he and his…
Rome’s 99 per cent
In the UK the richest 1 per cent — 300,000 — of the working population control 23 per cent of…
Allah, Zeus and the Church of England
A ‘prominent liberal cleric’ in London has held an Islamic prayer service in his church, St John’s Waterloo. ‘We all…
Greeks vs Greens
The Green party’s manifesto appears to make saving the planet only a small element in its otherwise painfully unoriginal agenda.…
Hyperides vs Jack Straw
In responding as they did to the Daily Telegraph ‘sting’, Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind may well have done…
What real debate looks like
Ancients would have been astonished that parties never debate against each other in open, public forum except on the telly…
Julius Caesar vs Isis
Isis disseminates videos of beheaded captives to spread simple terror. Julius Caesar knew all about it. In his diaries of…
David Davis vs Cicero
The MP David Davis has lamented that the British seem to prefer laws that protect their security rather than guard…
Long before the Magna Carta
Important as the Magna Carta (ad 1215) has been as a founding myth for everything we hold dear about law…
