Whenever sabers begin to rattle somewhere in the world, I am irresistibly drawn back to Thucydides, the Athenian general who wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War, the deadly clash between Athens and Sparta that raged from 431 to 404 BCE and engulfed most of the Greek-speaking world in its chaos. He wrote, perhaps, precisely…
To understand Éric Zemmour, the ultra-right candidate who has garnered so much attention in the French presidential election this spring, it helps to go back all the way to April, 1793. On the thirteenth of that month, France’s ruling National Convention voted the arrest of the deputy and journalist Jean-Paul Marat. The violent rhetoric that…
—book of the there we’d have been— We remained entranced by words positing a world beyond their reach, that words don’t go there said with words. They were speaking for the we that was no we they knew. It wasn’t music went where words were unable,…
Something new and unexpected is happening in Myanmar. No, not the most recent coup d’état. Few countries have had so many coups as Myanmar. The surprise is that, a year later, the military are still not in control. That is what has never happened before. On February 1, 2021, when a new parliament was due…
Can anything surprise us anymore? A madman with no political experience who boasts of sexually assaulting women is elected president of the United States, and the only thing that keeps him from doing irreparable harm to the American republic is his own stupidity and incompetence. A rabid mob of citizens, incited by his lies and…
Pity literary biographers. There are few writers less appreciated, there are none more despised. There they sit, with their church bulletins of family trees and their dental records, their interviews with ex-lovers, mad uncles, and discarded children, and go about “reconstructing” the life of someone they never knew, or knew just barely. To George Eliot,…
Name a classic Western of the 1950s starring a great actress of the 1930s. She should play a woman of power and influence, maybe with a little bit of a dominatrix vibe. (When critics talk about the film, they will probably call it “psychosexual”.) It is highly stylized. Whatever happens in it, it doesn’t take…
England with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral, with voices—one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept—the criterion of suitability and convenience: and Italy with its equal shores—contriving an epicureanism from which the grossness has been extracted: and Greece with its goats and its gourds, the nest of modified…
What makes you think I can live in a room from which you have removed – admittedly with considerable tact – one of the four walls? I agree, the view has really improved (not that you can see the Arno and the Ponte Vecchio in the distance) but is the (let’s call it) “radical renovation”…
Biographers and scholars agree: he was mad. But does it matter whether he really used to see angels dancing in the trees in his garden, or would spend long evening hours conversing with Isaiah and Ezekiel? Isn’t it enough that that he left us “Proverbs of Hell” and “Jerusalem”? Shortly before closing his eyes he…
Each morning when you go out on the balcony to enjoy your first coffee of the day you face the same intolerable backdrop: Delos reposing nonchalantly in precisely the same place you left it yesterday. How much you wish that nature, just for once, would cast off for a while its earnest attire and, like…
For Anne Carson In the second book of the Iliad, he calls him a mighty king: λάσιον κῆρ – in Rieu’s prose: “Pylaemenes of the shaggy breast led the Paphlagonians”. In the Fifth Book, he decides to have him killed – without too much fuss, in just two lines: “the great spearman Menelaus son of…
