The TLS blog

IEDs vs Bees

The wonderful Christina Lamb has been writing in The Sunday Times about how bees could help identify IEDs and save the lives of American and British soldiers fighting the Taliban. But ‘the logistics of carrying bees inside army vehicles moving around Afghanistan have proved unworkable’, she says.

I wonder why. If I weren’t in Cyprus now, reading The Sunday Times online in a dust-storm between the mosaics of Paphos and the Sahara, I think I could find a range of ancient accounts of soldiers fighting with bees, from the venomous poison-flower-eating killer bees of the Black Sea deployed against the Romans by Mithradates to the heated earthenware pots of bees hurled into rivals tents by military geniuses whose names I cannot quite now remember but could find, I think, back home.

Christina is writing of highly trained bees whose small hairs, normally used to detect pollen, can apparently be used to detect any scent. The IED-seeking bees will stick out their tongue when the explosive chemical is found. Add a simple detecting machine with a monitor that registers a signal when the bee-tongue is stuck out and all will be solved.

The soldiers would still, of course, have to travel about with the bees. This may be a difficult duty for those not familiar with our furry flying friends, one which the  modern city man soldier may indeed find harder than the peasant militias of old.

 Or perhaps the logistics have genuinely ‘proved unworkable’. 

 

The Duke of Sparta and me

There is a tradition at the British School at Athens that its annual London meeting is chaired by an interested outsider. This fortunate guest - the TLS editor temporarily raised on Tuesday to this place of  archaeological eminence - is allowed to speak on ancient Greek topics for about ten minutes before introducing the School's Director and the lecturer for the night.

So what was I to say? We were at King's College London, currently the centre of an increasingly public row about money between academics and government. The study of palaeography at King's and in Britain seems sorely tested and may cease - as even listeners to Radio Four's Today show learnt this week. But was the Saturnalian chairman supposed to enter these lists? It seemed less than festive to do so.

The dire economic state of Greece was more tempting. Those of us who once argued so long and hard about the dangers of the Euro might reasonably feel satisfaction at the theatre of absurdity now playing nightly in Athens, Paris and Berlin. I might have recalled that the central problem of the Euro in places beloved of fantasy was never going to be economic alone: a single currency without a single politics was always set to produce real political hatreds and betrayals whenever the Euro-play was judged over, the precise opposite of the outcome its proponents claimed to want. But that did not seen a very suitable theme for the night either. I have long been retired from this battle - and very happily so.

The history of the Saturnalian chairmanship itself seemed an attractive topic. For example, before reading the Times accounts of these meetings from the 1890s, I had no idea (shame on me, I'm sure) that there had ever been a living man called the Duke of Sparta. If asked, I might have placed him as a character in some disputed Elizabethan prototype of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It turns out, after brief research that the Duke, whose attendance so delighted the School's London supporters in 1895, held the title reserved, though not in everyone's opinion rightly so, for the heir to the Greek throne. And there were other curiosities too.

In the 1890s our predecessors talked about the benign power of Hellenism to improve the world - and why we should give the school more money to keep the Germans from getting all the best sites. I rather wish that I had taken that same road. But it is no part of the temporary chairman's job to cause trouble for a wonderful British institution for which, after hearing Catherine Morgan's report from the Director's desk and Margaret Kenna's lecture on Anafi' tourists, nuns, viticulturalists, icons and a unique epithet for Apollo, I felt extraordinarily proud. Good luck to my admired friend and TLS contributor, Malcolm Schofield, for his new tenure in the real chair.

Spirit of the TLS at PUNK

Last night the TLS went to PUNK.

Now, I hope I'm not misrepresenting the regular clientele of this patch of London underground between Soho Square and Oxford Street. Perhaps early on a Saturday night at club PUNK is alway the time to catch a gang of authorities on Garrick, Robespierre, Dumas pere et fils, contemporary opera and poetry, Bloomsbury painters, English typography, comprehensible post-modernism, the Pope, the French philosophes and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
And then, possibly not.

We were there to hear our house band, Spirit of Play, whose members can be found, all bar one, in the cast list at the back of the TLS each week. We whooped and cheered in what we hoped was best PUNK manner while our resident authority on eighteenth century theatre sang Dictaphone Don and other office pop songs for an audience including our expert on how the Enlightenment adopted the guillotine; and  while our Dumas-iste played her twelve-string guitar before colleagues she might more normally asks to check the Twelve Tables of the Justinian Code. On bass was our distinguished bass-graduate of the Royal College; the high singing notes came from our novelist, poet and the man you might confidently ask about the stage history of the Tempest; and an excellent time was had by all.

Of ourse we talked amongst ourselves a good deal, as we do - about the new Martin Amis novel, whether a non-fiction work-in-progress might be turned into fiction to suit the current fashions of the market and even about whether anyone overseas had yet reviewed On The Spartacus Road, a question which, thanks to the Irish Times yesterday and the Tuam Herald of Galway, was yes and well. Why wasn't Mary Beard here and hadn't she been extraordinary on Desert Island Discs?

But we only talked after the magnificent and witty, make-an-editor-feel-proud band, Spirit of Play, had left the stage and been replaced by the next PUNK act, a woman with a rather unreliable flute.