Brian Martin

Jan 9, 2025 | thespectator.com | Ed West |Brian Martin |Roger Kimball |Barnaby Rogerson

I visited Mycenae for the first time this autumn. While the ruins of classical Athens can seem almost familiar, the ancient hillfort of a millennia earlier truly feels as though it belongs to the world of gods and heroes, of Homer and the Trojan War. If my imagination hadn’t been destroyed by decades of television, I could almost imagine myself there.

Dec 4, 2024 | thespectator.com | Philip Patrick |Brian Martin |Benji Shulman |Daniel DePetris

Six hours. That was the duration of the profoundly disturbing and simultaneously farcical version of martial law invoked by South Korea’s president Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday night — the country’s first experience of military rule for 40 years. It was so brief in duration that if you weren’t plugged in to social media or watching TV you may not have been aware it had even occurred.

Dec 4, 2024 | thespectator.com | Christopher Booth |Philip Patrick |Brian Martin |Svitlana Morenets

Georgia’s government recently decided to spend money on fresh black “Robocop” uniforms for their riot police, with shiny new helmets to match. After parliamentary elections in October, they might have been forgiven for thinking the kit would go back on the precinct shelves with barely a scuff — a little shopsoiled at worst. Protests immediately after the vote were predicted, but turned out to be sporadic and rudderless.

Dec 3, 2024 | thespectator.com | Brian Martin |Philip Patrick |Maggie Fergusson |Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Emily Wilson, the distinguished translator of Homer, has remarked that Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls about the Trojan War is a distinctly feminist book. Renowned for her first world war Regeneration trilogy, Barker has now written The Voyage Home, a powerful novel about the first part of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. She takes the infrastructure of legend and invests it with brutal realism. Agamemnon’s return home to Mycenae after ten years of war is told entirely from the points of view of women.

Nov 21, 2024 | thespectator.com | Neal Pollack |Brian Martin |Philip Patrick |Maggie Fergusson

I played my last hand of poker on an innocuous Saturday afternoon in October. My pocket Kings lost to 4-7 offsuit. They shouldn’t have been in the hand at all, but I still did everything wrong at the end, and there went $500 to some sweaty moron directly to my right. “Clock me out,” I said to the dealer, my hands shaking. They’d seated me at the table right by the door, so I at least was able to contain my temper tantrum until I got outside.