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1 month ago | 
the-tls.co.uk | Franklin Nelson |Paul Cartledge |Eleanor Barraclough |Helen Czerski
A man wearing a dark rollneck sweater and a long coat stands in front of a two-tone door, his brow furrowed and his beard overgrown. Staring into the camera as if for a mugshot, he holds a newspaper in front of him. “Fire Bomb Attack on Black People: Unity Centre Bombed”, reads the front page. This cover-image introduction to the writer Farrukh Dhondy constitutes just one of the “fragments” he has “shored against [his] ruin”, after the closing stanza of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
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Jun 19, 2024 | 
msn.com | Paul Cartledge
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Jun 19, 2024 | 
msn.com | Paul Cartledge
Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
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Jun 19, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Paul Cartledge
As a student, John Boardman, who has died aged 96, was able to recite by heart texts in Attic Greek, the form of the language used in ancient Athens. But while studying classics at Magdalene College, Cambridge, he encountered two archaeologists whose work encouraged him to apply that flair to the study of classical objects: Charles Seltman showed him coins, and Robert Cook vases.
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Mar 11, 2024 | 
historytoday.com | Paul Cartledge
These are books of very different kinds, not exactly chalk and cheese, but certainly apples and oranges. All three authors are military historians, if of dissimilar stripes and with very varying direct, practical experience of warfare.
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Feb 24, 2024 | 
panmacmillan.com | Paul Cartledge |Catherine Nixey
Catherine NixeySynopsis‘In the beginning was the Word,’ says the Gospel of John. This sentence – and the words of all four gospels – is central to the teachings of the Christian church and has shaped Western art, literature and language, and the Western mind. Yet in the years after the death of Christ there was not merely one word, nor any consensus as to who Jesus was or why he had mattered.
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Sep 21, 2023 | 
greekreporter.com | Paul Cartledge
To ancient Greeks, our modern democracy would be considered an “oligarchy.” By that, I mean the rule of and by—if not necessarily or expressly for—the few as opposed to the power or control of the people. By Paul CartledgeWe owe to the ancient Greeks much, if not most ,of our own current political vocabulary all the way from anarchy and democracy to politics itself. But their politics and ours are very different beasts.
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Aug 10, 2023 | 
historyextra.com | Paul Cartledge |Paul Bloomfield
Legend tells of a line of seven kings who if real would have ruled Athens from around 1500 BC to 1200 BC, the first of whom was Cecrops I. During his reign, the Olympian gods Athena and Poseidon vied to become the new city’s deity; having gifted its people the olive tree, Athena prevailed – and the city was named after her. So runs one foundational myth. Ancient Athens: what do we know? Evidence has been found of habitation as far back as about 9000 BC.
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Jun 11, 2023 | 
neoskosmos.com | Paul Cartledge
Readers of Neos Kosmos won’t need to be told that one of the world’s most aggravated and thorny cultural-political issues has been and is that of ‘the Marbles’: the marble sculptures, that is, that originally adorned Athens’s truly magnificent marble temple, known for short as the Parthenon. Formally dedicated to Athena in one of her many capacities (as a Virgin, a sort of Jeanne d’Arc patriotic warrior), this was a temple to democracy and aesthetics as well as to religion.
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Jan 25, 2023 | 
newcriterion.com | Paul Cartledge
What if the Persians under the emperor Xerxes had conquered mainland Greece in 480–79 B.C. and added a new satrapy to the already hypertrophied Achaemenid Persian Empire, the biggest thing yet in the storied Near East? It would have been largely due, ultimately, to the “Great King,” the “King of Kings,” Emperor Cyrus II the Great.
