 I would like to have been in Cheltenham this week for the Times Literary Festival if my performance partner not been in academic seclusion in California constructing her Sather lectures on what made the Romans laugh.
Synchronised swimming through the classics needs someone at least as experienced on the Cheltenham circuit as Mary Beard.
So there has been nothing like our Greeks vs Romans fun of this time last year.
Instead I've been in London, applauding another distinguished TLS colleague as he won Britain's biggest poetry prize on Wednesday.
Seeing Mick Imlah receive the £10,000 Forward cheque was worth any absence from the fire-eating tents.
There was also the extraordinary first night of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land on Tuesday when the financiers heard the banks crashing and found the exit doors before the tragi-comedy even began.
It would be good to get to Gloucestershire to see Simon Schama tonight. My only contribution to Cheltenham this year has been to review his new book The American Future: A History last Saturday.
In a week of economic woe when Barack Obama has begun to cruise to the presidency on its tide, our top story-telling historian can be happy that his own best hopes for the future - unusually clearly expressed in his book - are coming closer.
Schama and his audience will surely be laughing.
Beard and her Californians are happily looking at laughter.
Admirers of Imlah are thrilled.
The Pinter is packing in the crowds.
All is well with the world.
I
 I spoke to the politician and author, Denis MacShane, this afternoon about the row over the Nobel Prize for literature in the United States.
The prize went this morning to a French novelist little known in England outside the TLS and friends - an award made to the sound of general American grumbling.
The secretary for the $1.4m prize had last week dismissed the US as 'too isolated, too insular' for the taste of the Swedish jury this year.
So a European winner from the continent that Horace Engdahl called the 'centre of the literary world, seemed always more likely than a call for Philip Roth.
The actual choice - of the 68-year old French novelist, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - was less objectionable in the US than some might have been - but still a pinch of salt in the American wound.
Continue reading "Nobel's gift to France" »
 Through the flash-bulb wall outside the Duke of York's theatre last night came top celebrities and financiers side by side.
Before the first, first-night words of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land were spoken, the financial side had headed for the exits.
The mogul next to me at 6.50 pm had taken one look at his champagne glass and another at his Blackberry and braved the paparazzi for the second time.
Because he was merely a money-man in pursuit of crashing banks - and because Russell Brand and other starry friends of the stars remained inside - no one noticed much.
This great play, as Michael Billington reports this morning, 'yields new meanings' in every production, new ways of seeing Hirst, the heavy-drinking writer in his Hampstead house, Foster and Briggs, his sharp-suited criminal minders, and Spooner the mysterious poet-scrounger and saviour from the heath.
This is a magnificent production, an essential night at any time. But it was hard last night not to see the whisky-sodden Hirst as a tottering pin-striped personification of the City, Foster and Briggs as sub-prime spivs and Spooner as a well-meaning politician who might just have an answer but is hard to believe - and is also drunk.
One of the few certainties of Pinter's action is that Hirst is waiting for his 'financial adviser' to arrive for breakfast - and that Foster and Briggs have instructions to make the adviser any of the variable fried food combinations he demands.
But it is Spooner gets to eat the breakfast. There is no financial advice. The finance man never arrives.
The one who should have been sitting next to me has probably not had his breakfast yet.
 Greetings from The Times Literary Supplement to the new website with the whiff of Waugh.
The first edition of Tina Brown's The Daily Beast has just crackled into our inbox - with wit and a few wasp stings and with even its snappy red-and-black regalia recalling the greatest novel of our trade.
The world is falling around our ears.
So what better day for a beady-eyed sense of 'wow, horror, what happens next?' from the woman whose mind, as long as I have known it, has never stopped asking?
At a time when it is fashionable to be gloomy about journalism as well as the world economy, The Beast is a double tonic.
It is new.
It is full of the sense that things will get better, and that, while they don't, we will have fun finding out why.
Continue reading "Hail to The Beast" »
 Margaret Thatcher never heard the reading of Rudyard Kipling's bitter monologue 'The Mary Gloster' when we were in Bermuda together eighteen years ago.
She was too busy planting trees and talking to her favourite president's successor about life after the Berlin Wall.
Only a few of her accompanying press pack had the time to hang about - as we do - and thus the opportunity to hear an eloquent tour guide outside the house on the island where Mark Twain used to live.
The words streaming from his well-practised lips were from Kipling's poem about the business magnate bidding a death-bed goodbye to his son. It had been one of Twain's favourites - and Thatcher's too I learnt this week.
Continue reading "Lady Thatcher and Sir Anthony G" »
 Our friends in the Literary Saloon say that I might give some 'lowdown' on this week's Translation Prizes.
As the TLS 'frontman' (never been called that before) I am supposed to be reporting from 'behind-the-scenes' too.
The fights, the rows, the sandwiches, the chunky charm of Louis de Bernieres and the delightfully expensive short story he read as his lecture?
Well, how about this?
The organisers always give the frontman a speech to read.
No one could remember unaided all our beloved sponsors, each of our multi-lingual judges, the sole winners, the joint winners, the commended runners up and the order in which they get their white envelopes.
But when I began on stage on Monday night I went 'off message'.
I somehow couldn't say that there was a prize, as written on my card, for translation into THE Greek.
Why THE Greek?
Why not just Greek?
Continue reading "THE 2008 Translation Prizes" »
 A panel of critics at the Globe and Mail in Toronto has selected its 'fifty greatest books'.
Other people are then asked to explain why the panel is right.
This seems odd at first sight but is, I discover, the best way around the listomania of blogland. Another fine bit of editorial design by the excellent Martin Levin.
This week I get to explain why Sophocles' Theban Trilogy is in the all-time top fifty.
 Which is fine - and also interested my generous friends in Philadephia.
But, if asked to form a top fifty of my own I would have havered over what that could possibly mean before declining in a funk.
Justifying the Globe and Mail's endorsement is much easier, merely journalism. See below.
A previous blogmeister once asked me to list my favourite music of all time.
'My Favourite Things', I said.
'Great', he replied. 'Things too'.
No, I mean, 'My Favourite Things, the 1960 John Coltrane recording, with McCoy Tyner on piano, the one which brought back the soprano saxophone. . . surely one of the finest albums ever made'.
'I still think your top fifty things would be a good idea'.
Well, if someone else were to choose them, I would happily oblige.
Continue reading "My Favourite Things" »
 Political make-over artists love a new buzz word.
This time it is Lipstick.
Always tricky stuff.
The oral cosmetic may be a rare element on the White House trail. For watchers of the ancient world, it was a toxic substance long before Barack Obama got into trouble with it today.
Lipstick was even more dangerous for political women in past times than it is now.
The bromine compound that reddened Cleopatra's lips was as toxic as the lead white on Elizabethan faces.
Tonight Sarah Palin may be riding on the high moral ground - as Republicans chide Barack Obama for comparing their economic policies to 'lipstick on a pig'.
An unforgivable slight, says John McCain, a clear slur against his proud Alaskan 'lipstick on a pitbull' running mate.
But watch out for tomorrow.
The Bromine cosmetic of the ancients was always hot and poisonous.
The element is volatile even at normal temperatures - never mind at the heat of an US presidential campaign.
The word come from the Greek for fire, fury and odours of goat.
Dion per Sona, in her prophetic comment on a previous post, is red right.
 Tony Keen is upset by my use of 'Ms' before the name of a woman whose book I was reading and enjoying a few weeks ago.
He writes:
"I've just read a review in the Wall Street Journal by Sir Peter Stothard of Maria Wyke's Caesar: A Life in Western Culture.
What drives me to comment is the following sentence:
'Ms. Wyke, however, is a sophisticated practitioner of her craft, a professor of Latin at University College London and a graduate of the British Film Institute.'
For me, this raises the question: if Sir Peter knows Wyke is a professor, then why not refer to her as "Prof. Wyke"? Instead, Sir Peter uses "Ms. Wyke" throughout. This looks, on the face of it, an instance of diminishing the status of female academics, by not using the same courtesy title as one would grant to a male."
Continue reading "Is Ms Right?" »
 So do we now know the name of Sarah Palins's dog?
The best female names that Ovid (see below) could come up with for his killer hounds were Blanche, Tigress, Dingle, and Barker.
Blanche had 'snowy hair'.
Barker was 'a noisy bitch'.
Dingle was 'a slender bitch sired by a wolf'.
Lipstick!
In her speech last night, Sarah 'What's the difference beween a hockey-mom and a pit-bull?' Palin was surely scarier than them all.
 I had hardly finished posting about the names of the hounds that killed Actaeon in a Latin poem when we had the name of the Republican vice-presidential candidate and her family.
Track, Trig, Bristol, Willow and Piper were, it seemed, the names that the hunting governor, Sarah Palin, had chosen for her children.
As I'd been saying before this new hunter story arrived, Ovid's list for the canine killers in the story painted by Titian - canvas currently FOR SALE at £50 million to the British public - also had a Track at the beginning.
It then went on for some thirty additional named animals.
As well as Gnasher and Shag, there were Woodman and Whitefoot, black-coated Sooty and Barker the noisy bitch - all keen to rip apart poor Actaeon for catching the goddess Diana without her clothes on.
See the painting below. A TITIAN BARGAIN. OUGHT TO BE £150 MILLION AT LEAST.
Ovid was being quite modest in his number of dog names. Eighty five appear in the Greek sources. It was a literary convention, a kind of game, perfect for children as well as dogs when present in large numbers
Every one of the Palin names would fit perfectly this sort of list - trees, birds and shooting terminology preferred.
British kennels kept them too when hunting was still allowed in Britain.
Arctic, Bustle, Canvas, Lapwing, Magpie, Safety, Satchel.
Even the most imaginative kennel-keeper lost imagination after a while.
What does the Governor of Alaska call her own family dogs?
George, Edward, Alice, Emma and Rose?
Given the web-interest in this issue - the names of dogs and children, not the fate of the Titian - we will doubtless soon learn.
 How are these paintings 'important' to the nation?
That is the question today to Timesonline from James of South Hams - and probably from many others too.
The prospect of handing £100m to a Scottish Duke for two pictures painted by a Venetian for a Spanish king has also not gone down well with Tom of Bermondsey who says:
"Seriously? We're in the worst economic times in memory, and the government is considering spending this much money on some paintings. If this is granted it is an absolute disgrace".
So what must the save-them-for-the-nation strategy be?
We can talk about genius and oil paint as much as we like but we first have to rehabilitate the unpopular husband of one of our most unpopular queens.
The pictures by Titian in the newspapers this morning were commissioned by the man we normally know as nasty King Philip II of Spain, the Catholic bigot behind the Spanish Armada.
 To raise £100m from the public we have to make a quick start on the alternative story, Philip the First of England, the tolerant, fun-loving, art-fancying husband who kept Bloody Mary mostly in line, Princess Elizabeth in the line of succession and tried to stop too much burning of protestants.
Next we have to stress the gender-bending sex and violence that come before and after the scenes in the pictures of Diana with Actaeon and Callisto.
When Philip the Good got his Titians he and his friends knew the poem by Ovid on which they are based.
Poor Callisto's pregancy, the cause of Diana's outrage, came about after she had been raped by Zeus.
The king of the gods had been dressed up as Diana at the time.
Afterwards she grows hair and claws and bear jaws.
 Just the thing for the royal bedrooms - and the national collecting tins.
As for Actaeon the hunter, after watching Diana undressed, he is turned into a stag and torn apart by hounds.
Ovid in his Metamorphoses (A.D Melville's translation) names all the doggy killers individually, Spot, Gnasher, Glutton, Stalker, Clinch, Nigger, Shag - before concluding that there was ancient disagreement on whether the goddess had gone too far in her revenge.
"Some believed Diana's violence unjust; some praised it as proper to her chaste virginity.
Both sides found reason for their point of view".
The case for the £100m money-for-the-Duke fund is likely to be similarly hard fought - though with less use of reason.
What sort of slogan might win over our sceptic hearts and minds?
Save our heritage!
Remember the king we never quite had!
Last chance to see the hairless woman!
See the pervert before Gnasher and Shag get him!
It is going to be tough.
 It seems only a few minutes ago that I was angry at blogs that told me merely to read articles in newspapers.
Now I like them.
I might even post one - like this one.
There is a fine review in The Sunday Times this weekend by Bryan Appleyard of the book on Traffic that I was blogging about two weeks ago. The TLS review will be a little late - not least because the editor hogged the book to himself too long.
There is also an excellent interview in The Observer with our own Mary Beard about her new book on Pompeii - which comes with illuminating lights on traffic of its own. Check it out.
 The wise Newsweek defence analyst, John Barry, has been recalling a conversation with the wise British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, one which bears heavily on their successors' failures to understand events this month in Georgia. He posted the following points in the comment box but I have extracted them here lest they may be missed.
"In a long conversation with me in his lonely retirement, Macmillan once said that, in his long experience, the intelligence services were "extraordinary" in their analysis of gleanings about weaponry. ("Nuts and bolts ? First rate", he said in his studied Edwardian way.)
But, he said, the analyses which reached his desk about political developments --- especially judgements as to what foreign leaders might do next --- were "hopeless, quite worthless". The reason, Mac said he had concluded, was because nothing had trained the analysts to think like political leaders. "Take some major, or his civilian counterpart. How can they possibly understand how a political leader thinks ? Someone who has risen to power through boldness and brutality. Nothing prepares them to think like him."
(The quotes are from memory, but I am confident are accurate in substance.) So, Mac said, he had taken as PM to demanding the raw reports --- and from these, he said, often reached conclusions quite at odds with the analysts'. He had, as I recall, no clear sense how to grapple with this problem. But he had concluded, as a consumer, that even what he acknowledged, with admiration, were the elite experts of the JIC weren't adequate to the task.
I suspect Georgia will prove, with hindsight, to support Mac's verdict. US officials of all levels urged Saakashvili not to respond to what he (and they) saw as clear Russian efforts to provoke him. But the officials (and their intel analysts) simply didn't comprehend how Saakashvili viewed the choices he faced. Which were: act now or face the irrevocable loss of those two Georgian provinces. OK, worth a gamble.
A judgement not unlike that made by King Hussein in 1967. Who told me, years later, that he knew that if he declared war on Israel, he would almost certainly lose the West Bank. But if he didn't go to war, he believed, he would lose his entire kingdom. Because of the domestic backlash --- most especially from the Palestinians within Jordan proper. So: an irrational decision to go to war ? Not by Hussein's calculation. But it would have taken a bold analyst to predict that --- witness the Israelis' surprise at Hussein's action."
 A call comes today asking why I haven't accepted that the life of Jesus Christ was invented in imitation of the life of Julius Caesar.
The claim is carried - with only a little adverse comment - in Maria Wyke's new book which I reviewed in the Wall Street Journal this morning.
Ms Wyke is a distinguished classicist and reception theorist. Her book is an analysis of how we have 'received' Caesar's story - from the poetry of ancient Rome to the opprobrium piled upon George W. Bush.
Any reading of Caesar's story has to have some significance for her - and the parallels between Caesar's life and that of Christ have apparently been discussed since the 1980s.
Both are accused of making themselves kings. Both are betrayed by friends. Both wear crowns of natural foliage. Both are deified after death. And there is more.
Perhaps I should have mentioned it
The transformation of Caesar's cult into that of Christ was made, it is said, in Vespasian's reign in order to encourage Jews into the Roman Empire.
In the 'reception theory' form of scholarship it is not necessary to refute such a claim, only to note it with comment.
It is highly notable - St Mark's gospel as corrupt retelling of the Roman civil war.
Read more at http://www.carotta.de/..
Read how I failed to note this received truth in the WSJ this morning below.
Continue reading "Christ was Julius Caesar" »
 It is always difficult to look out on a river of swans, geese and ducks and to know whether the birds are your old favourites, even your old friends, or newcomers to the water.
Longevity in water birds is closely related to body size. Swans live longer than geese; both live longer than ducks. But that is just the start of wondering whether the greylags on the lawn this morning were with us last year or are new geese.
We are not talking about new species here. We can be sure that even any strange fowl is from a family we know. Only three new ducks were identified in the whole of the twentieth century - in South Korea, New Zealand and Argentina.
The Thames in Berkshire is safe from that kind of newcomer.
The greylags may simply be individual new arrivals - and especially numerous this year. Water birds regularly return to old haunts but immigrants have to start somewhere.
How about my garden?
Greylags ought never to never feel like immigrants here - or anywhere.
These birds are what we might call the basic goose, pink-legged, orange-beaked, both sexes more or less the same, hardly changed over 2 million years. The mallard is in the same aristocratic club.
 There were dozens of both in sight this morning - with not a Canada goose anywhere.
The Canada is a heavy breeding and unpopular parvenu who normally dominates any group.
But this was 'Daughters of the Revolution' day on the Thames - only greylags and a few green ducks.
Perhaps they had a particularly good breeding season - with unusually successful use of the left ovary which in wild fowl is normally the only one functioning.
No bird needs more food than an egg-laying water bird. Perhaps this year the female greylags got it.
It was wonderful to see so many so alone.
The guys who named these geese recognised their superior priority, Anser Anser. There is no more goosey label than that.
They are not very grey, except under their wings in flight. And 'lag' means merely 'to drive' - what hungry humans have always tried to do to geese.
But Anser Anser. Perfect.
The best possible start to a Sunday.
 "It would be hard to conclude that independence has so far brought Georgia anything other than poverty and shame".
In preparing the issue of the TLS that goes to press tonight, I've just been reading a review we published a decade ago by the distinguished critic, Lesley Chamberlain.
"No sooner had Georgia waved its white, black and magenta flag at the departing Russian oppressor, than it promptly insisted that south Ossetia remain under its rule rather than join pro-Russian north Ossetia. Two weeks' civil war in 1992 then forced the first elected President, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, to flee. He died later in obscure circumstances while planning to retake Tbilisi.
Georgian troops that same year, in a disastrous move, marched into the former Soviet autonomous republic of Abkhazia, which, with Russian help, then expelled 250,000 Georgians.
After the various conflicts had died down, Western aid agencies were obliged to make Georgia a prime relief target. In all the old empire no former Soviet republic had declined more rapidly."
Continue reading "To Georgia: one more perfunctory apology " »
 More on the blogger-frightening roads of India - from Vanderbilt's excellent Traffic (see previous posts).
The best way of getting a driver's licence in Delhi is not to take lessons but to pay an 'agent'.
An American study tracked 822 applicants, a 'bonus' group tasked with getting a licence as quickly as possible, a 'lesson' group given free driving instruction and a standard 'comparison' group.
The 'bonus' group did best in getting a licence but when given a proper test 69 per cent of them failed. Only 11 percent of the 'lesson' group failed.
The people who had the best driving skills were 29 per cent less likely to get a licence than the worst.
'Corruption' the authors of the study reported 'appears to substitute for actual driving skill'.
In Hindi, Vanderbilt writes, the same word also stands for home-made car and a bribe to a government official.
A 'jugad' is a both a motorcycle-fruitbox hybrid and the baksheesh needed to get a permit to drive it.
The danger in Delhi is, in any case, much less to any car driver than to other road-users. While more than half the road fatalities in the US are among drivers and passengers, in the Indian capital it is only 5 per cent.
The rest of the roadkill is pedestrian in nature. Camels are not separately counted.
 The ancestors of my fellow road abusers in southern Italy drove on the right too - though lacked the luxury of 'sorpasso' lanes.
Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic (see previous post) cites an American 'traffic archaeologist' called Eric Poehler whose name and job-description were both - shame, shame, I'm sure - unknown to me before.
He has apparently analysed the 'directionally dignostic wear patterns' on the streets of Pompeii and discovered evidence of both driving on the right hand side and a familiar-sounding system of one-way streets, roadworks and carriage-free zones.
If two carriages arrived simultaneously at an intersection, who went first?
Vanderbilt poses the question but doesn't say whether Poehler or anyone else gives an answer.
The most brazen and the boldest, like now, I imagine.
For a firmer answer on this perhaps, and assuredly much else, I'm looking forward to consulting the imminent book on Pompeii by my friend and fellow blogger, Mary Beard, last heard from dodging camels on the drive-on-the-left motorways around Delhi.
 A few days on the roads of Naples heading south makes there only one book for me in the TLS pile now that I'm back home.
Traffic, the way we drive the way we do (and what it says about us), by Tom Vanderbilt.
Look up the author's references to Italy and there is - not surprisingly - a rash.
Left-lane driving on the autostrada is reserved for passing and 'for many drivers in the left lane their entire trip is one epic overtaking, a process know as il sorpasso, a phrase heightened with additional meanings in social mobility.'
So now I understand.
'Get in the way of someone in the midst of a sorpasso and they will soon drive so close that you can feel, on the back of your neck, the heat of their headlights'.
Ah, yes. A Fiat Punto Diesel, my sluggish companion through some of the obscurer classical sites around Reggio Calabria, is especially vulnerable in this regard.
This flashing is 'less a matter of aggressiveness than incredulousness (sic) at your violation of the standard'.
So that's OK then.
Continue reading "Flash, flash, poop, poop" »
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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I would like to have been in Cheltenham this week for the Times Literary Festival if my performance partner not been in academic seclusion in California constructing her Sather lectures on what made the Romans laugh.
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