A Don’s Life

What makes a good review

Reviews don’t make a blind bit of difference to how a book sells. That, at least, is the popular wisdom among publishers. That means Jeffrey Archer’s latest “novel” can get rubbished by the critics and still make millions (the vast publicity budget presumably helps). Or, the other way round, there are thousand and thousands of marvellous books, greeted rapturously by reviewers, that have failed even to pay back their meager advance. A nice review warms the heart of the author but it doesn’t have much impact on the cash  registers.

True. But it does rather underestimate the point of the whole reviewing business. Of course, working on the TLS, I’m biased – but I am committed to the idea that reviews have an important part to play in (for want of a better word) literary culture. Not only as a guide to the quality of what authors and publishers turn out, but also in their own right – as comment, criticism, insight, and a good read.

So how do I choose reviewers for the Classics books when I’m at the TLS? In a way it’s a bit like a dating agency.

Teeth

I’ve become a tremendous fan of Radio 4’s “A Point of View” – the ten minute talk broadcast between “Sunday Worship” and the News at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning – in the slot that Alistair Cooke used to occupy. It’s a kind of secular “Thought for the Day”, with a decidedly academic tinge. And it has some of the same rhetorical flourishes – including outrageously improbable links and connections.

You know how “Thought for the Day” will start with some blokeish reflections about Rooney’s latest sending-off. Then there will be a second or two’s pause, while our media vicar smartly changes direction with some line like “Well I’ve always thought that Jesus was a bit like a referee”…and then we’re off onto the religious bit.

Well, last Sunday David Cannadine, who is now writing and presenting his second or third mini-series of  “A Point of View”, kicked off with the unveiling of a blue plaque to John Betjeman in Highgate before he settled in to a nice cross-cultural (or at least transatlantic) comparison of dentistry and oral hygiene. The link? “Plaque” of course. And the fact that Betjeman had the most appalling teeth which for most of his life were apparently covered with foul green slime.

What on earth could kissing him have been like?

Making it with Mantegna

This is the last week of the university vacation and the final  -- that is,  final final -- deadline for my book to be with the publishers is on Tuesday. So it took some blithe self-confidence (or perhaps self-destructive folly) to go to London today for two “gigs”. The truth is, of course, that they were both arranged some time ago, when I had optimistically imagined late September would be a time of post-partal calm, and some trips out would be fun.

In fact it was fun nevertheless. The first date was to speak at a “Greek Breakfast Club” from 8 till 9 at a London school. About sixty people – some kids, some parents, some locals – had turned up to hear about the Parthenon over coffee and croissants. Not surprisingly, for people who had taken the trouble to come along before work, they were an extremely keen audience. But any self satisfaction I was feeling about catching the 6.15 train in order to be with them was dampened when I discovered that the teacher-organiser had already taught one lesson even before the Club met. It’s this kind of “twilight” classes – and “twilight” is a euphemism if we’re talking about 7.15 in the morning -- that keep Classics going in many schools. Even for someone pretty committed like myself, it’s gobsmackingly impressive.

The next date was at the Henry VIII theme-park (otherwise known as Hampton Court Palace), where an enterprising group of curators is trying to enhance the profile of Andrea Mantegna’s cycle of paintings of the “Triumphs of Caesar”.

Fiddling while Rome burned

Professional classicists have a habit of pouring cold water on popular facts about the ancient world.  Take something that everyone thinks they know about Greece and Rome, and the finger-wagging scholar loves nothing better than saying it’s wrong. My own curmudgeonly assault a few posts ago on “Et tu Brute” was a case in point. It must rank as one of the most famous phrases in the Latin language – and guess what, smirks the don, it was written by Shakespeare.

Well, for a change, the good news is that Nero did fiddle while Rome burned. It just depends what you mean by fiddle.

Most people, I fear, take “fiddling” in the wrong sense.

Where are the academic super-stars?

The Vice-Chancellor of Manchester University is reported to be recruiting Nobel Prizewinners to join his team of academics. In fact he has already signed up the economist Joseph Stiglitz, from the USA, to work part-time. He is only the first of a series of promised “iconic appointments”. It is all part and parcel of nudging Manchester up the super-league of world-wide academic institutions.

I have no idea on what terms Stiglitz has been attracted to Manchester. But the usual deal in the international race for university super-stars is to offer them a lot of money, no ”coal-face” administrative responsibilities and a teaching load that is made up of a few chosen seminars with clever graduates – none of the basic undergraduate teaching or the standard stint on the catering committee that the rest of us undertake.

Vice-Chancellors tend to love this kind of head-hunting (for Manchester University read Manchester United?). It adds lustre to their University, and kudos to their own cv. Stiglitz is, I guess, the Beckham of Economics.  But the truth is that the brightest lustre ought to go  to  those institutions that actually produce the Nobel Prize winners, not those that just buy them in.

Why e-mail is bad for business.

If you want to know how much e-mail has changed working life try being without it for a day or two. Last week my college system was completely cut off (that is “down”) for 36 hours – and it was like stepping back in time in the company of that long-lost friend, the telephone.

When I first started teaching, the ring of the phone was a normal accompaniment to the working day. In fact, I’d have to unplug it if I wanted to be sure of getting an uninterrupted hour with the students. Now I’d be (un)lucky if it rang more than once a morning.

And I don’t ring out much either. Apart from domestic calls to call-centres (1 hour and 55 minutes, and still unanswered, to Orange customer service two nights ago, for the information of any fellow sufferer who may be interested) and the obligatory “I’m on the 9.15” style mobile communications, I only regularly phone in two circumstances.

First is when I have something so confidential to say that I don’t want to risk the remotest possibility that my message will get forwarded around the planet. The second is when I want to exploit what is now the surprise value of a phone call, to add impact to whatever I’m wanting to say. Most people assume that a phone call signals some sort of special urgency and respond accordingly.

Actually, a day on the phone last week proved rather more than nostalgic.

Et tu Brute?

As Blair and Brown slug it out behind the scenes, and their partisans line up for a more public fight, up-market journalists have gone back to their Latin. “Et tu Brute?” has been bandied about more than it has for decades. There’s no better slogan for being shafted by an erstwhile ally.

“You too, Brutus?” is what Julius Caesar is supposed to have queried when he spotted his friend Marcus Junius Brutus amongst the posse of senators pointing their daggers at him on the Ides of March. That’s if you print it with a question mark. Print it with an exclamation mark and it becomes more of a threat: “They’ll get you too, Brutus” (which, of course, in the end they did).

In fact, Caesar never said it.

The benefits of empire?

One of the spin-offs of working with the BBC Roman drama-doc was a visit to the film locations in Tunisia (not a free visit, I should add, before outraged licence payers sound off to the Director General).

I had expected Tunisia to be a concrete jungle of ghastly beach hotels. And in part it was exactly that. Indeed the brand new motorways speeding down to the south of the country suggested that more similar resorts would soon be on their way. But there was a lot more to it than that.

Tunisia is a country that seems defined, for better or worse, by centuries of foreign imperialism -- most recently by the French.  There are a couple of streets in the centre of the capital Tunis itself that could almost be mistaken for Paris (with exactly the same lines of trees, the characteristic lamp-posts and advertising hoardings). And everyone I met spoke French as well as Arabic – showing how language, just as in ex-British India, can somehow survive political revolution.

In fact, to judge from what I’ve read (mostly guidebook history, it must be confessed),  the conduct of the French on the Tunisian/Algerian border in the mid years of the twentieth century was not much different from that of the Israelis recently in Lebanon. So the current good sense of the French government in modern geo-politics suggests either that they have learned the lesson of  their colonial mistakes – or that they have a real nerve to preach at the rest of us, however worthy the message.

That said, I was more interested in the Roman empire of 2000 years ago.

Rome: beyond grapes and gropes

Over the last few months I’ve been “consulting” for part of a series of BBC drama-documentaries on ancient Rome (“Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire”  -- which starts on BBC1 later in the month). It’s been something of a dramatic conversion for me, since I had always been a dreadful snob about “drama-docs”. A conscript cast of B-list actors, dressed in sheets and forced to mouth the most plodding lines a script-writer could ever have invented” “Oh look Horace, there’s Virgil talking to Maecenas . . . let us go over to the temple to see what’s going on.”

My conversion was largely the work of the BBC history team, who had done their homework on Rome and seemed genuinely interested in finding new ways to present the ancient world on television (going beyond the grapes and the gropes). How could you find a style that had the impact of the BBC/HBO’s “Rome” but treated the historical issues seriously for a general prime-time audience? Could you bring different episodes of Roman history into the limelight – not just the usual staples of Julius Caesar and Nero?

They were also keen to involve me from the very beginning – not just wheel me in when they had already decided what line to take. And, yes, the actors were to be A-list (Sean Pertwee, Michael Sheen etc, as it turns out).

Of course I might still live to regret it.