A Don’s Life

Giving birth to a book

Between everything else, I’ve spent the last two weeks putting the final touches to my Pompeii book which is coming out in September in the UK and in November in the States (dont be confused by the different titles -- it's the same book). I haven’t done this as often as some – but my experience is that however much time you leave for checking the proofs etc, it never feels quite enough. And, no matter how many times you’ve looked things up, there always seems to be more to be done.

Mostly, it is the ‘have I left the iron on?’ phenomenon. Although you are at some level quite confident that those references to Pliny are actually right, once you’ve raised that tiny doubt in your mind, all you can do is check them again. And, of course, just like with the iron (which I did once find burning away, after I’d driven back from work) , every now and then, there really is some howler waiting to be discovered.

My own particular Achilles heel is the town of Cnidus.

How to spoil the best view in England

This picture shows ‘The Backs’ in Cambridge on a good and relatively traffic-free Sunday afternoon. For those of you who don’t know the town well, The Backs  -- as the name suggests – is the stretch of ground that runs along the backs of the big old colleges (King’s, Clare, Trinity etc), with the river Cam wandering along the middle.

Cliché as this may sound (and even with those silly rick-shaws), it is a totally uplifting sight, with buds and crocuses and wonderful golden leaves in the autumn  – and it works for me every time even after 30 years here. This is also where you get that canonical view of King’s College Chapel (here seen over the top of passing cars).

Or you would get the canonical view, if it wasn’t almost totally blocked by vast coaches for large parts of the day during the summer months.

David Blunkett rants about Oxbridge

David Blunkett is trying to rescue his failing career with a bout  of Oxbridge bashing – often the final recourse, even now, of a Labour politician on his last legs. “Yes my career is going nowhere, but I shall raise a few cheers if  I  lambast the privilege of the dons in their luxurious quads, and the student toffs.”

But even though I’ve heard it hundreds of times before, listening to his interview with the Fabian Review,  I find myself fuming. Oxbridge, so the Blunkett line goes, has no idea how to choose the best. Oxford has been resistant to any move into the 21st century. Cambridge has paid only “lip service” to modernisation. Apparently we reject excellent working class students simply because they wont “fit in”.

Let me say to start by saying that I am basically on Blunkett’s side. That is, we both think that all the kids in the country should have access to excellent education, and that the very best universities (however the ‘best’ is defined)  should be open to the brightest students – whatever their social, financial or educational background.

So far so good. And that is exactly the goal I have been working towards ever since I came to teach in Cambridge in 1984. It’s not always straightforward. It also means educating yourself in how you can fairly select these students (especially in a world in which most applicants have straight A’s at A level or are predicted to have that).

Homer vs P. G. Wodehouse

I must be a glutton for punishment. I have suffered a series of emphatic defeats in a variety of literary debates (I lost when I was representing the Parthenon against the Alhambra, when I was standing up for the Romans versus the Greeks and when I was saying no thank-you to an imaginary invitation to dinner with Socrates). So why accept the invitation to represent a famous author of my choice in a balloon debate  at the Ways with Words festival at Dartington?

Answer? Partly because Sam Leith, of the Telegraph which sponsors the festival, was wickedly persuasive. Partly because I’d never been to Dartington, which everyone says is tremendously beautiful (and well worth the five hour train journey each way – which indeed it was). Partly because hope springs eternal – and I assume that one day I’ll get lucky.

You know the score of a balloon debate. You have to imagine a group of people – in this case writers – in a sinking hot air balloon. Each contestant argues for why his or her chosen author should be survive the disaster, when the others don’t. The audience weighs the arguments up and votes who to chuck out and who to keep in.

Fellow contestants were Andrew Davies (famous TV and movie adaptor of famous novels) who chose Jane Austen; the novelist Philip Hensher representing P. G. Wodehouse; and Carmen Callil, founder of Virago, with Voltaire. I opted for Homer (the Odyssey Homer, rather than the Iliad Homer). The whole thing was chaired by Alexander Waugh.

Things were  looking good for Homer after the first presentations, at which we were allowed eight minutes to make the case for the survival of our chosen author.

Hadrian -- some myths busted

I am delighted that the Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum looks set to be the huge success which it deserves. One of the downsides is that we classicists are going to have to get used to the rest of country enthusing about Hadrian in a way that will make us cringe.

Last night’s Newsnight Review was a good example of just this. Newsnight Review is usually an excellent programme, and last night they had three intelligent critics on board (David Aaronovitch of this parish, Marina Hyde and Simon Sebag Montefiore). The trouble was none of them semmed to know much more about Hadrian or the Roman empire than they had picked up in their preview visit to the show.

The result was that they gave all kinds of misleading impressions to the innocent viewer. For a start you could easily have come away with the idea that we were uniquely well-informed about Hadrian thanks to his autobiography. As the presenter said, “No extant copy of his autobiography survives. But later copies were made so we know a lot about his life”.

Well sorry guys, all we know is what may, or more likely may not, come from his autobiography in the scrappy, short and flagrantly unreliable biography in the series known as the Scriptores Historiae Augustae. So when Marina Hyde said “he was obsessed with cohesion the whole way through”, the truth is that we don’t have the foggiest clue what he was obsessed with.

How do you rate your professor?

Doctors are apparently getting anxious about being “rated” online (at iwantgreatcare.org). University teachers have suffered this for years in websites like RateMyProfessors.com.

Whether this is a cover for personal vindictiveness, a useful sharing of information or just a bit of fun, I’m not entirely sure (though I must say I veer towards the vindictiveness line, occasionally lightened by a fan club  element). It is, however, an all too predictable offshoot of “questionnaire culture” and “feedback society”,

Let me say at this point that I very much want to know what students think of my lectures and supervisions. And I have various ways of finding out. At Cambridge, where most lectures are optional, the bottom line is whether they are still coming at the end of term. But other good fact-finding methods are (surprise, surprise) asking them, or asking your colleagues tactfully to ask their own students. Sometimes an anonymous questionnaire helps too.

But our students tend to suffer from questionnaire fatigue (one for each lecture course, one rating, one rating the whole of their lectures per term, one rating their college teaching . . . ). So, even if you hand them out at the beginning of a lecture, and collect them before you leave the room, many of the responses are pretty perfunctory. If you opt, as my Faculty sometimes does, for an online version, you will be lucky to get a 20% response rate unless you offer a bribe. But it’s hard to give a random bottle of champagne if you also want the responses to be anonymous.

The bigger problem, though, is how to use the responses you get responsibly.

The Hadrian Show at the British Museum

As some commenters have wondered, I have had a sneak preview of the Hadrian exhibition in the British Museum (in the old Round Reading Room, where the terracotta warriors were). The installation wasn’t quite finished when I saw it last week, but it was already looking stunning. There were all kinds of things I hadn’t seen “in the flesh” before.

Especially moving were the everyday household objects from one of the hideouts of the Jewish rebels who were so viciously crushed by Hadrian’s troops. House keys, pans, a straw basket that could have been made yesterday and a mirror. (According to the catalogue, this shows the presence of women among those hiding out. I’m sure there were women – but don’t men use mirrors too?)

These made a strange match for the wonderful bronze statue of Hadrian from a legionary camp on the  River Jordan – the distinctive head of the emperor, over an elaborate bronze cuirass (though it’s far from certain that the head and the cuirass originally belonged together).There were also some great images of the young Antinous, Hadrian’s lover, who mysteriously drowned in the Nile. The Mondragone head from the Louvre is making a return visit after its appearance at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds a couple of years ago. But  the stars of this part of the show must be the silver dishes from a tomb in modern Georgia, one of which features Antinous in its central roundel.

As usual, there were all kinds of things on display from the home collection that I hadn’t realised the BM owned. I didn’t know for example that Charles Towneley had got his hands on some of the original pilaster capitals from Hadrian’s Pantheon. But everybody’s favourite, I suspect, are going to be the gorgeous pair of peacocks from Hadrian’s tomb (the Castel St Angelo) on loan from Rome.

There seems to me a good chance that this show will do a huge amount for the profile of Roman Latin and Roman culture over the next few months.

That said, there are also all kinds of more strictly historical issues raised by the presentation of Hadrian  here that I hope wont get overlooked in the enthusiasm for the stunning collection of objects.

Why research is fun

Well, OK, it isn’t always. I don’t know what longueurs and anxieties go hand in hand with splitting the atom or curing cancer – or any of the equally worthy but less glamorous forms of science research. But anyone who does the library rather than the lab version of pushing back the frontiers of knowledge can tell you about the tedious days of reading pretty unappealing material (just try reading an ancient dictionary) looking for some particular gem that isn’t there. Even worse is the low level panic that the clever idea that set you on this particular month of reading is going to turn out to be a blind alley.

No academic autobiography that I know ever discusses this. In published recollection and authorised versions research tends to go right.

But actually, “going right” is itself a bit more complicated than it seems. Because the best days are not when you find what you’re looking for, but when you come across something completely unexpected.

In the Cambridge University Library there’s one predictable route to the unpredictable. It was the library’s nineteenth-century practice to bind up short books and pamphlets together, perhaps as many as ten or twenty in a single volume. So you order up the thing you’re wanting, and you get a load of what you weren’t expecting too.

The chances are that it’s one of the other things that takes your fancy.

Where to eat near Chania

This blog does not usually feature restaurant reviews. But – inspired perhaps by the presence of Fay Maschler on the same plane back from Athens – I thought I’d venture to share with you a couple of my favourite, regular eateries near Chania.

In fact, we had a number of memorable meals while we were in Crete. One extraordinary evening involved dining in an inland village restaurant…a single table was already laid up for us in the road in front of the  church as we drove in, and the lamb chops were already cooking on the brazier, and a feast followed. As one of my Greek friends said, it felt a bit like a scene in an Italian movie.

But for regular re-fuelling we went either to the restaurant in our village, or on the beach. Both of them must count as “unspoilt” (no glossy pictures of the food propped up outside, no man stationed in the road to entrap the passing tourist)…both have been going strong, to my knowledge, for 20 years. Both are in easy reach of Chania by car.

Is Pompeii in a state of emergency -- again?

The Italian government apparently wants to renovate Pompeii and make it more user-friendly. The response to this announcement in the British press has been largely favourable – and no doubt struck a chord with many visitors.

It is, after all, terribly irritating to have to enter the site through battalions of private enterprise guides who swoop upon you with the standard: “You English? You want guide?”. It is also irritating to find many of the best houses in the town closed. Currently, for example, the famous House of the Vettii is closed for restoration.

That said, the new Berlusconi idea that all can be solved by a new “Pompeii commissioner” isn’t as attractive as many UK newspapers have implied. It all depends what you want Pompeii to be and what you think the problems are.

There isn’t actually much the matter with the current administration of Pompeii (apart from lack of funds) – and a very great deal to be said in its favour.