Pericles
A brief history of harlots
I write this as a follow-up to last week’s essay on muzzling after making whoopee. I’m on my way to…
Boris Johnson needs to face down his own people
To beat the virus, the government is asking us to keep to simple hands-face-space guidelines. When these are not followed,…
Boris’s hero Pericles didn’t need a spokeswoman
A spokeswoman has been appointed ‘to communicate with the nation on behalf of the Prime Minister’. He apparently needs ‘a…
How to fight a good war
Serifos There’s no high life here, only family life, so I’ve been hitting the books about great Greeks of…
Pericles would have approved of the PM’s response to the pandemic
It must be infuriating for those who see the Prime Minister as a prisoner of a rigid elitist mindset that…
Pericles for PM: Boris should forget Augustus and stay focused on his hero
Boris Johnson is a gung-ho classicist. He has supported the subject throughout his journalistic and political career, is a generous…
Boris is facing his Sparta moment
The PM’s hero is the Athenian statesman Pericles, and a Periclean crossroads is now approaching. According to the biographer Plutarch,…
Socrates the romantic hero?
If western philosophy is no more than ‘footnotes to Plato’, so, arguably, is the myth of its founding hero, Socrates.…
Corbyn is the master of ‘raising issues’ – with no result in sight
Jeremy Corbyn is the master of ‘raising issues’. He received an obscure prize last year for his ‘work for disarmament…
Lend me your ears
Complaints about the decline and fall of political oratory are nothing new. Back in 1865 a British reporter branded the…
There were no safe spaces at the dawn of democracy
Brilliant Oxford undergraduates argue that it is right to prevent us saying things they object to, because speech they do…
What Pericles knew that David Cameron doesn’t
It does seem extraordinary that the increasingly puce-faced Mr Cameron offered us an ‘in-out’ referendum and is now telling us…
Alexis Tsipras is just doing what an ancient Athenian would
The EU finds it difficult to understand what drives the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Quite simply, he is a…
Why Hesiod would have gone for Grexit
Why do Greeks want to keep the euro, or remain in the European Union? The combative, creative, competitive, mercantile classical…
Putting Greece on a sound footing is like cleaning out the Augean Stables
There’s nothing to add to Martin Vander Weyer’s item about Hellas of two weeks ago in these here pages except…
Boris Johnson on his plans for the Olympic Park: inspired or whimsical?
Jack Wakefield on the Mayor’s ambitious, not to say whimsical, vision for the Olympic Park
Where Alcibiades once walked, amateur tax spies are trying to entrap poor pistachio-sellers
Athens I am walking on a wide pedestrian road beneath the Acropolis within 200 meters of the remaining Themistoclean wall…
Today’s TV debates are pointless – here’s the real thing
Ancients would have been astonished that parties never debate against each other in open, public forum except on the telly…
The lesson of Athens: to make people care about politics, give them real power
Voters explain their apathy about politics on the grounds that the politicians do not understand them. No surprise there, an…
Demosthenes’ lessons in ambition for Boris Johnson
The ancient Greek word for ‘ambition’ was philotimia: ‘love of high esteem in others’ eyes’. Both Boris and Alex Salmond…
What Boris and Pericles have in common
What is Boris’s great secret? Does it lie in the bust of the Athenian statesman Pericles (c. 495–429 bc) that…
