Ancient Rome
Navalny vs the emperors
A Roman emperor would consider the tyrant Putin’s treatment of Alexei Navalny’s supporters as foolish but, looking at Russia as…
Cicero, mutuality and BLM
The Black Lives Matter website (different from the new Black Liberation Movement) mostly presents an image of an organisation of…
Words to that effect
In his 37-book Natural History, Pliny the Elder (d. ad 79) wondered why we wished people ‘Happy new year’ (primum…
Swear words
Freed from the bonds of the European Union, Britain is now in a position to sign whatever trade deal it…
Classic examples
To what use does one put history? Romans thought it provided ‘lessons’. Modern historians rather sniff at the idea, but…
In it to win it
So Humpty Trumpty has had his great fall. But how democratic or logical was his election in the first place…
Phantoms of liberty
Word has it that ministers already do not bother to argue their corner with the government’s inner ring, while a…
Brevity goes a long way
The PM is insisting that the briefings he finds in his red box every evening should be, well, brief, and…
The Romans liked a stylish death
World Mental Health day raised again the issue of suicide, still regarded as happening only among those ‘whose balance of…
Where does authority really lie in the UK? The ancients would have known
Forget David Davis, Boris, the cabinet, the commentariat. It’s time to concentrate on the big picture and the central question:…
If Trump seems bad, remember Caligula
Whatever one makes of the accuracy of the journalist Michael Wolff’s depiction of President Trump, it cannot all be the…
When armies take over democracy dies
While the military is running Zimbabwe, there is no hope of anything resembling a functioning democracy replacing the tyrant Robert…
The wily courtesans who won more respect than modern-day feminists
Some MPs have been exploiting their power by their sexual fumblings with the lower ranks. The result is that when…
Silent films
On 15 September 1888 Vincent van Gogh was intrigued to read an account of an up-to-date artist’s house in the…
What lies beneath
It was not so unusual for someone to turn into a god in Egypt. It happened to the Emperor Hadrian’s…
Plutarch and the EU
Boris Johnson argues that the current European Union is yet another failed attempt to replicate the golden age of a…
The great pretenders
Can the beauty of Palmyra be reproduced by data-driven robots? Stephen Bayley on copies, fakes and forgeries
How Rome did immigration
Last week it was suggested that the questions asked of London mayor Sadiq Khan had nothing to do with racism,…
Rome, racism and Sadiq Khan
‘Racism’ refers to the belief in racially determined inferiority, most often recognised in body-type, about which, by definition, nothing can…
Pliny on the joy of elephants
In order to deter poachers, hundreds of tons of elephants’ tusks are being incinerated in Kenya. But even for Romans,…
Tax returns to boast about
As Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell whinge away about how rich David Cameron’s family is, they might consider that in…
Seneca on bouncers
The papers are full of top stories about important people who cannot get into important parties because the doorman does…
…Long live ENO!
The three most moving, transporting death scenes in 19th-century opera all involve the respective heroines mounting a funeral pyre —…
Oscar vs Augustus
There was something admirable about the spirit of careful mockery behind the doggy bags on offer to the finalists in…
Moving statues
Sculptural topplings provide an index of changing times, says Martin Gayford
