 London Underground bosses objected earlier this year at a nude portrait of Venus being used to promote the Cranach exhibition at the Royal Academy.
There were fears that it might be defaced by outraged Islamists and others whose sensitivities were more to themselves than to art.
For anyone who wonders what such a defacement might have looked like, this is a cover of the TLS containing Timothy Hyman's excellent review, sent by a reader from eastern parts (not a renownedly extremist realm) after it had passed through the local security forces.
Someone has worked really hard at this.
Such a bikini and skirt do not come wihout effort - even pleasure perhaps - on the part of the penman.
And he was not even waiting for a train.
 A new edition of Dracula has arrived to darken an otherwise bright day in London.
This is an improvement on most days in the past few months when a bright book has been needed to break through the dark.
Any reader of these blogs who has been following Mary Beard on early lesbianism will be pleased to see recognition in Dracula's Capuchin Classics foreword for a 'dreamy tale of Lesbian vampires', Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novel Carmilla.
This fine work predated Bram Stoker's oeuvre by a quarter of a century - and became the source of various 'sexploitation' movies in more open-minded years.
One of Mary's 'commenters', my old friend Oliver Nicholson, has pointed out that the OED gives no instance of Lesbian or Lesbianism in its modern English sense earlier than 1870.
It was possible for a respectable family in Willesden as late as 1898 (presumably admirers of Catullus, 'tenderest of Roman poets') to name their daughter Lesbia; she grew up to be Lesbia Scott, wife of a vicar of Chagford and author of an All Saints; Day hymn of great charm, "I sing a song of the saints of God".
Thankyou for that, Oliver, as ever.
I wonder how many girls in Chagford in the 1870s were christened Carmilla.
 When I first became a political journalist in the 1970s, I made the mistake of asking a Sunday Times colleague whether he was going to vote in that day's local election.
He looked at me very strangely, as though I'd asked him to fill in one of those 'rate us for service' forms in a fancy hotel.
He said he would always happily write for money about what was happening around him. But give an unpaid verdict that no one else would ever know about? No way.
This week I went back in time and wrote a bit of political journalism about the London mayoral race.
I have also just now voted.
It was much, much easier writing the piece.
The article was for The Wall Street Journal, for whom I've written happily, on subjects ranging from Tony Blair to Alexander the Great (ok, not much range) for many years.
 Writing, especially for an overseas audience, is enjoyable when the race is between two unsuitable exotics of the British political system, a Labour incumbent who has likened a Jewish reporter to 'a concentration camp guard' and a Tory challenger who calls black children 'picanninies'.
I was not expected to express a preference - unlike the excellent Alice Miles in The Times this morning. Describing the show was enough.
By contrast, facing a pale pink ballot paper in our Hampstead polling station was no fun at all. Description was no part of the job - and deciding was a terrible task.
We Londoners get two votes for our Mayor. So we can express our personal exotic first choice preferences - for a Green an English nationalist or whatever. And then we have to make a second choice, the vote which will actually matter, for Labour 'Ken' or Tory Boris' as we must unaffectionately call them.
If you do it the other way round - voting 'Ken' first and then 'England for the English', your second choice will not be counted at all.
Not just a terrible task but a terribly complex one too - for British voters used to simpler ways.
Ther are also pale beige and yellow ballot papers for people and proportionalities on our London Assembly.
Occasionally, in the past, I've heard of plans to incentivise ballot-crossers, to revive democracy, to get the vote-shy into the booths with some kind of bribe.
Just like those 'tell us what you think of our hotel and win a free dinner' pleas.
This morning that seems a suddenly good idea.
If you are reading this far away and want the London Mayoral scene set (by an incentivised journalist), continue with the version below.
Continue reading "Ken or Boris? A terrible cross to bear" »
 The creator of James Bond, I have learnt, was a devoted TLS reader.
The TLS has received many commendations in its 106 years of publication - or promotional endorsements as we know them now.
But that from Ian Fleming, mentioned in an article by Andrew Lycett, which we are getting ready for this week's paper, is a sentence to warm any marketer's heart.
"An essential item in my desert island library would be The Times Literary Supplement, dropped to me every Friday by a well-trained albatross".
I won't spoil the story by revealing how this work of literary ornithology came about.
Strange to relate, we have also dug up a letter to us from Fleming, commending the TLS for criticising the illicit use of his name for advertising purposes in France.
We made a mistake in that piece - and he criticises us for that too.
But I'm sure his spirit would not mind our using his albatross for advertising ourselves now.
We are also republishing this week Fleming's only review for the TLS.
Everything will be up on the website on Wednesday.
 My favourite book programme turns up on Radio Four on a Sunday afternoon when the wonderful Mariella Frostrup brightens the darkening driving hours.
She treats all the self-publicists who turn up on her Open Book with the same nice mixture of amusement and respect. Britains' writers and publisher do not know how lucky they are.
So surely an author should not mislead Mariella except for the best of reasons?
Yesterday the novelist Will Self, merely promoting his new novel, Butt, gave an account of how he came across the word 'tontine', a key theme apparently of his Butt.
His explanation was hard to believe and came with no immediately obvious reason at all.
Continue reading "Mariella and Will" »
 This is the last weekend of newspaper production at Wapping.
For twenty two years, the first amid terrible scenes of violence, four great papers have been printed between The Thames and a nineteenth century rum store in the docklands of London.
The journalists were there too.
From next week the writers and the printing machinery will be several miles apart.
 I haven't yet seen the new £650 million presses for The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and The News of the World.
Even from the TLS, particularly from the TLS you might say, I have appreciated a powerful investment of confidence in the future of print.
A writer or editor need never do the visiting any more.
The presses have flown.
But the print remains.
Continue reading "Last night at Wapping" »
 I was sure I had a copy somewhere of a newish book on Archytas of Tarentum, the philosopher-king and friend of Plato who invented the jet-propelled pigeon.
My esteemed colleague, Mary Beard, came to the TLS office yesterday afternoon and I challenged her with 'borrowing' it, an unwise challenge as was clear from her frosty look.
Why did I want a book on a mathematician who 'doubled the cube' - whatever that is? What was I on about?
It is true that numbers have never been my favourite signs.
Nor is the science of southern Italy in the fourth century BC Professor Beard's favourite topic.
So, why did I want my book on Archytas? And why did I think she might have taken it?
The answer is all about what one does in the theatre during the passages of a Shakespeare play whose gist one loses for a minute or so, the parts that an aggressive director normally cuts out but which Michael Boyd of the RSC on Thursday night did not.
Continue reading "Who's got my bloody Archytas?" »
 All praise to the 'flame managers' of Beijing.
These boys in pale-blue may be 'thugs', according to Britain's Olympics boss, Lord Coe.
Dammit, they push around our celebrities and policemen and don't even 'speak English.
But they do, at least, show the Olympics for what it is rather than what its western supporters want it to be.
Citius, Altius, Fortius? That is the Latin piety used since 1924.
'Violenter, adroganter, belliger', would always have been a more accurate motto.
Continue reading "In gratitude to the true Olympians and their torch " »
The audience at the TLS debate at the Oxford Literary Festival was asked last night whether it would say yes or no to dinner in Athens with Socrates.
Did attenders relish the chance to question the world's most famous philosopher, to travel back in time 2,500 years to those dinner parties where truth and justice were the topics of talk?
Did they yearn to hear subjects discussed for the first time in any way that we would consider philosophical today?
Or was the Socratic crowd rather less than it was cracked up to be?
Would anyone else get a word in edgeways while a filthy old man drank, drivelled and chopped logic into his navel for hours?
Would any woman even get past the door if she was not available for sex-on-demand - or a 'flute-girl', as the classical euphemism has it?
Wouldn't any civilised person be better off washing their hair that night?
The virtues and vices of Socrates, fact and fictional, have occupied an extraordinarily central position in philosophy debates since the old boy hit the hemlock in 399BC. The night of April 1st in the Newman Rooms was a well-attended addition to this distinguished history - not as cerebral as some but much more fun than most.
On the thanks-but-no-thanks side, we had Mary Beard, renowned subversive, blogger and our classics editor at the TLS - plus the historian Tom Holland.
On the yes-please-do-we--bring-a-bottle side we had our regular contributor, Oliver Taplin - and the renowned Platonist, M.M. McCabe.
Beard-Holland gave a gruesome account of the disgusting smell, food and sexual habits of a dinner with Socrates - with a warning that Plato's account of the magnetic sage was at variance with all the others. How would the time-traveller know what he or she was going to get?
Taplin-McCabe hit back with an appeal to put philosophy over foul behaviour and risk over comfort.
McCabe made the difference, in the impartial judgement of the chairman, with a spell-binding disquisition on the Socratic method of reaching truth and beauty and all those other things that Oxonians take for granted in the Newman Rooms.
RSVP. Yes, please, was the vote at the end of the night.
 Can you have a successful Olympics if martyr monks get more attention than the athletes?
In the 'everything-has-to-be-perfect' mood of Beijing it seems not.
What happened in 165 AD, a Chinese correspondent asks, when the religious protester, Peregrinus Proteus, burnt himself to death at Olympia? (see previous post)
Did it affect the festival? Was it still a good event?
Passions are running high on this point.
Continue reading "Olympic flames (Part Two)" »
 Perhaps the Chinese should just chill out at the prospect of Tibetan monks planning to burn themselves to death at the Olympics.
If Olympic torch and yellow scarf get too hotly entwined this summer, the Beijing spokesmen might remind TV viewers how it was just the same in the old bourgeois games.
Publicity-seeking religious zealot threatens to immolate himself between the boxing ring and the race track.
And does so. Whoosh. Just another day's event in 165 AD.
Peregrinus Proteus was the monkish pyromane of his day.
He was a Roman prisoner-of-conscience who for some reason never quite made it to being a martyr.
He had killed his father - which perhaps turned some of the top christians against him.
Anyway, he lit his own funeral pyre - and departed the stadium in his own chosen way.
The Chinese might cheerfully note that, unlike the Buddhists of today, Peregrinus never got a good press for his pains.
The only account of his immolation to have survived comes from a delightfully hostile source, Lucian, the second century Syrian writer who claimed to have been an eywitness to these unofficial Olympic flames.
Peregrinus, it was said, had only became a Christian in the first place so that he could get rich and famous. Doubtless (since we are talking Olympic propaganda here) this was an outrageous slur.
Whatever his motives, he gave four years warning of his intentions, got everybody excited, and did not disappoint.
He said he wanted to put a 'golden tip on a golden life'.
His colour coordination had a sure touch of the Lhasa style.
 'Gelato for tonsils'.
Ice cream for a tonsil operation.
It's a phrase in the early pages of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, a fine novel made more famous by the multi-Oscar-winning film of Anthony Minghella, the ice-cream seller's son from the Isle of Wight who died from an operation for tonsil cancer today.
The news bulletins in Britain and America show the shock at an early and unexpected death.
Minghella was one of the great British artists of our time, that very rare thing, a writer who set Hollwood records as a director and was still a writer first.
I did not know him. I met him only once.
But we long-time cancer-survivors still get superstitious about this sort of thing.
I'm left tonight with those words which he must have read so long ago when he was well.
'Gelato for tonsils'.
Bizarre? Yes.
Bad loss? Yes too.
March 13, 2013
 "What did you do in the war, grandaddy?"
"Well, TEN years ago, I sat in Downing Street and Camp David and Hillsborough Castle watching President Blair (and some not very keen colleagues, right) try to remake the world as he would have liked it to be".
"What exactly did you do yourself?"
"If you read The Times this morning, you will find out."
"Do you always write a piece when there's a birthday for the Iraq War?"
"It seems like it".
"Well, in 2007 I went back to see the Iraqi women who had warned Mr Blair (as he was then) how Baghdad politics wasn't quite like the Westminster kind. He didn't want to know. It was in The Times Magazine. Our friend, Gill Morgan, was the editor and godmother of the project.
Then in 2008, I looked back at my notes and wrote about how everyone in Downing Street as the war came nearer talked about football all the time.
Look it up."
And after that, there were tens of thousands of words in those blue files over there, one for each of my Thirty Days.
It was a long time before newspapers grew tired of remembering Tony Blair and George W. Bush and the things they tried to do.
Was the President of Europe on our side then, grandaddy?
"Tony Blair was only British Prime Minister in 2003. So yes, he was on our side. It's a bit hard to explain."
 Before everyone gets too excited about the blindness of David Paterson, the new governor of New York (not a disability first for US politics by any means), we might remember that the first political personality in all of Roman history was also blind.
Appius Claudius Caecus is most famous for overseeing the Appian Way, the first 'Roman road'.
But he made democratic history in 312 BC by promoting slaves' sons over aristocrats to the Roman senate.
Critics point out that he kept the priesthood posh. But he was a worthy forerunner for today's new Democratic man.
He is the first real character who comes to life in the history of Rome.
David Paterson himself comes nicely to life in this on-the-Clinton-stump encounter with The Times.
Caecus also made the first political speech in Latin of which we have any decent record - a prototype of the 'no surrender' rhetoric which is still with us - though not to be heard anymore from former New York governor, Eliot Spitzer, who has had to surrender his office to Mr Paterson for buying expensive prostitution.
Caecus was blinded because of a 'curse' it was said.
His own best known saying - also still with us and expecially so in New York this week, is that "every man is the architect of his own fortune".
Quisque faber fortunae suae - if anyone wants to write it on a subway wall.
 This year’s Olympics organisers must be inviting only sinophile sinologists, I suppose.
So there’s been no invitation to me yet to discuss the state of life and letters in mysterious parts of China before the drug-fuelled runners, jumpers and strutters do their stuff in Beijing this Summer.
Too bad. I guess that we TLS classicists have already had our turn.
Four years ago, in the weeks before the Athens Olympics, we had our tour buses to Delphi and our talk of this and that, formally on the theme of why once upon a time Greek literature was the greatest thing and why hardly anyone read what Greek writers wrote today at all.
Seamus Heaney was with us. And another much valued contributor of poems to the TLS, the American poet, Rachel Hadas.
But the poet I remember best from those day was one I didn’t know before at all.
Continue reading "So potent was religion in persuading . . . " »
 He once stole Iris Murdoch's typewriter because his need, he said, was greater than hers.
He made most of his money from exploiting his friendship with George Orwell - and he hated the truth of that.
When the poet Paul Potts died in 1990 the Times obituarist noted his Dante Called You Beatrice as 'one of the most truly romantic confessions of the century', noting, however, that 'the prose becomes the poetry he feared he could not write'.
Potts was a disappointed man of Soho in an age when disappointed artists famously filled the places that money-splashing tourists fill now.
Before the days of street pornography - that advance celebrated everywhere in the obituaries of Paul Raymond who died this week - there were pubs where poets hawked their wares and lived off alcohol and each other.
Such is the accepted version of what went on. And alongside Tambimuttu, Dylan Thomas and George Barker at the bar there was Paul Potts.
He is often described as born in Canada but was instead a man of Datchet.
He is most remembered now for poetic failure and being 'irascible and light fingered'. It does not do to steal a lady novelist's typewriter.
His name does appear sometimes when some other Soho bohemian dies - when those typewriter-and-Orwell stories turn up in the life of a film-director who did not make many films but drank alot and was memorably attractive to women.
Fortunately it is not just the death of Paul Raymond who brings old Soho to mind.
An unusual catalogue has arrived from the bookseller-writer, James Fergusson, offering 'two working manuscript notebooks' by Potts with a 'further archive of typescripts, manuscripts, letters &c [1939-48]. . ring-marked and a little soiled'.
Fergusson describes Dante called you Beatrice as an 'extraordinary hymn to unrequited love' while noting, as is de rigeur for the Soho school of failure, that it 'was intended to be a new Unquiet Grave'.
His short bill of sale is a contribution to literary scholarship in itself - as is the rest of the catalogue in which it appears, a memorial to the Oxford bookseller, Robin Waterfield , whose biographical sketch by Fergusson, not available online as far as I can see, is a thing of bald beauty.
The catalogue is available from jamesfergusson@btinternet.com, price £5.
The price for the Pottsiana?
£1,750.
Which in pre-Paul-Raymond days would have whiskied-and-watered its author for months.
 Everyone should have another world.
Everyone should have another place, imagined, created, recreated, where they feel at home.
I had thought that one of mine was Homer's Odyssey - and that poem's own odyssey into the modern mind.
I enjoyed reading Alberto Manguel's book on this theme - and spent a gentle hour or so saying so last week to the readers of my friends in the excellent literary section of the Toronto Globe and Mail.
And then this weekend I began another book which arrived at the TLS last week.
Erica Wagner at The Times had asked me to look at Edith Hall's 'The Return of Ulysses, a cultural history of Homer's Odyssey'' - and today, Spring-cold by The Thames, I have done just that.
Cheerfully too - although I had planned to spend the time on another Roman part of my 'most comfortable ancient worlds'.
And then fine books on the reception of Homer - like those suitably mythical London buses - always coming in packs.
Never mind.
It is sometimes particularly clear to me why I admire so many classical scholars - and why we appraise so much of their work in the TLS.
Edith Hall's book has added to those reasons.
The range of her inquiry - and its detail, from George W. Bush's odysseys to the mystery of the orgasm and back - adds to my sense of knowing what I already saw, quite wrongly and unreasonably, as already mine.
And, so far, I have read barely a half of it.
 Whether the 'Barack' in Barack Obama stands for peach or apricot or Persian or all three (see comments on last post), this is the number of democrat candidates that we look like seeing after the Texas and Ohio primaries next Tuesday.
Or will we?
What sort of shake will be needed to make Hillary fall finally from the 'autumn apricot' tree?
 Perhaps I haven't been noticing before. But I've just seen my first book in a catalogue to come with an endorsement from Barack Obama.
University of Chicago Press is offering a reissue of Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History with a quote from the Democrat frontrunner about "one of my favourite philosophers".
It turns out that Senators Obama's admiration for being 'humble and modest' in our belief that we can eliminate the hardship, pain and 'serious evil in the world' was not expressed exclusively for his home state's most distinguished publishing company.
It came from an interview reference to Niebuhr which has attracted considerable interest in the US though not yet much in the UK.
A little upscale intellectual reading matter is always attractive in a candidate. I remember Bill Clinton making jolly claims once for his intimacy with Marcus Aurelius.
Most voters won't know what Obama is talking about.
Those who have heard of Niebuhr will be impressed.
Those who have read and understood him will be too few to matter.
The only slight worry for those who fear Obama as the next Jimmy Carter is that Niehbuhr was claimed as a big deal in the Georgia peanut farm libraries too.
 The 'valley of the shadow of death' is ' an ancient but probably fanciful' rendering from the fourth line of the 23rd Psalm.
The 'darkest valley' is the phrase justified and preferred in modern versions.
In Leonard Bernstein's notoriously challenging Chichester Psalms, commissioned in 1965 and using early themes from West Side Story, all the words are sung in Hebrew.
So those in York Minster in June 2006, who were concentrating hard at the 90th birthday concert for my friend, Jack Lyons, did not need to concern themselves for death, shadow or darkness.
Today Jack is dead - and the newspapers this morning tell the stories of his business skill, his personal charm, his generosity to musicians all over the world and to the court cases which overhung his later years.
Jack was a great philanthropist for the arts, a rare man of a rare kind, never more needed than today.
The Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall at York will be one of many enduring legacies.
 His personal qualities were etched out, enhanced for all his friends to see, by the difficulties of his last years.
And eventually, though the fight was long, the unfairnesses of the Guinness case became understood by more than just his friends.
To listen to music with Jack was always to see it on his face, the Chichester Psalms in his beloved York most clearly so.
To listen to music with Jack was always to listen to music with his beloved Roslyn too, the singer who had long brought so much music and more into their shared lives
Bernstein never wrote a happier sacred song - and Jack's face was full of happiness that 90th birthday night in the Minster, surrounded by music students, listening to music students whose work, especially this most difficult work, he had helped to come alive.
That is how I remember him now.
Sir Peter Stothard is Editor of the Times Literary Supplement, the international journal of books and ideas. Between 1992 and 2002 he was Editor of The Times and in 2003 he wrote, Thirty Days, a fly-on-the-wall account of Tony Blair in Downing Street during the Iraq War. He writes on politics and literature, ancient and modern.
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London Underground bosses objected earlier this year at a nude portrait of Venus being used to promote the Cranach exhibition at the Royal Academy.
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