Ancient Greeks

Bad sports, from the ancient Greeks to the present

21 August 2021 9:00 am

Sports history, writes Wray Vamplew, is sometimes ‘sentimental, reactionary and built on the implicit assumption that the sporting past was…

Who advises Dominic Cummings?

19 October 2019 9:00 am

Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to the Prime Minister, thinks that there is no ‘better book than Thucydides as training for politics’. But…

Corbyn is the master of ‘raising issues’ – with no result in sight

10 February 2018 9:00 am

Jeremy Corbyn is the master of ‘raising issues’. He received an obscure prize last year for his ‘work for disarmament…

A print of girls in a gym from 1884

2,500 years of gyms (and you’re still better off walking the dog)

7 March 2015 9:00 am

My favourite fact about gyms before reading this book was that the average British gym member covers 468 miles per…

From Stephen Collins’s Some Comics

The 10 best loo books of 2014: why we sing so much better in the shower and what became of Queen Victoria’s children’s milk teeth

22 November 2014 9:00 am

Nancy Mitford would not call them ‘toilet books’, that’s for certain. Loo books? Lavatory books? One or two people I…