A Don’s Life

How rich are Cambridge students?

One of the local student newspapers -- Varsity -- has got another scoop. Last term it conducted an online questionnaire, which apparently revealed that 50% had at some time or other in their university career 'plagiarised' (whatever that meant).

I wasn't sure how much weight to put on these anonymous confessions, honestly. But now Varsity has run a new questionnaire to find out how rich the average Cambridge student is and how much their parents earn -- and, for the benefit of the punters, they've broken this down by college and Tripos subject. It's the lead story this week, even upstaging the article on that burning Cambridge controversy on the wine served to students at St John's Formal Hall. (That's irony, by the way, before you write in . . .)

Some of this new scoop plays to our usual prejudices. History of Art comes out top of the subject rich list -- with a claimed average weekly budget per student of £182 per week and an average parental income of £118k. Not enough to buy young Rupert a Caravaggio to work on, but still a generous cushion against poverty.

But there were other, surprising, results.

Send a gunboat -- or a cruise missile

If you explore Khartoum, it's hard not to be reminded that Sudan has more than once been at the sharp end of Western fire-power. On one of our first days in the town we went walking along the banks of the Nile (nicely colonially paved, Embankment-style, and tree-lined). The guide book tipped us off that if we went into the Blue Nile Sailing Club, we would find The Melik, one of Kitchener's gunboats, sent originally in 1898 to claim Khartoum back for the British, and now beached -- and used as club house and Coca-Cola store.

Sure enough there she was -- even if now more of a den for the children than a club-house. It was fun clambering over the old thing, though she cant have been much fun when she was in active service. She was part of the new military technology which Kitchener used to slaughter the Sudanese forces at the Battle of Omdurman, leaving maybe as many as 20,000 of the enemy dead to just 48 English casualties.

Even Churchill (who was present) was occasional queasy, though he concluded that, all in all, it was the "most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians".

Not so domesticated is the site where Clinton's cruise missiles landed in 1998 -- on what, you remember, he claimed was a factory on the outskirts of Khartoum making chemical weapons for Bin Laden.

Whirling dervishes

Despite what is normally said, it is in fact easier to make sense of ancient, dead religions than live modern ones. Classicists tend to moan terribly about the lack of information they have on ancient rituals. What on earth did happen at the Roman ‘Lupercalia’, for example, or the ‘Lemuria’? But in my experience it’s much easier to build theories out of just one or two weird pieces of evidence, than it is when you know a lot -- most of which, inevitably, is contradictory.

How on earth modern anthropologists do it, when they are actually there witnessing what’s going on, I really don’t know. I certainly didn’t know what to make of the Whirling Dervishes we went to see in Omdurman (now part of Greater Khartoum).

These Sufi Muslims ‘perform’ every Friday evening outside the mosque/tomb of Hamd en-Nil. Over more than an hour or so, in a circle surrounded by onlookers, with beating drums and chanting, they apparently work themselves up into an ecstatic state – and that involves the spinning around (‘whirling’) that gives them their popular title. When darkness starts to fall, they go into the mosque for prayers.

Beyond the textbook line that this is a way of reaching a heightened state of religious awareness, I couldn’t say what it was all about, and was not much the wiser for having been there. That said, there was plenty in the ceremony that helped me think about how ancient religious rituals might have been.

Why is Gordon Brown like the Emperor Tiberius?

It's always nice when your old students put what you taught them to profitable use. Novelist, stand-up comedian and young polymath, Natalie Haynes read Classics in Cambridge and once upon a time took my third-year course on the Roman emperor (or, to be precise, 'The Roman emperor: construction and deconstruction of an image' which did quite a lot of comparison between political power in the Roman world and power in our own).

Hence a smile comes over me to see her writing a classical op-ed piece in today's Times.

Her theme? Which modern politician is like which Roman emperor?

She scores a few nice hits. Obama is the modern Titus, the golden boy of the Flavian dynasty, everyone's favourite-- until he died just two years into his reign. (Though she doesnt mention that in the course of his rise, young Titus destroyed the Jewish Temple and paraded the menorah and its other sacred objects as spoils through the streets of Rome -- which would hardly have endeared him to New York democrats.)

And Gordon Brown is the morose, suspicious and hypocritical Tiberius. (Though, so far as I know, Brown doesnt enjoy underwater sex games with little boys on some sunny island.)

But often the memory of the young doesn't go quite far back enough to hit on the most apposite or revealing match.

Cambridge University reaches 800

Today is the 'official' 800th birthday of the University of Cambridge (that's 'official' in the sense that the queen has an 'official' birthday). I'm dead keen on the Senate House illuminations, which you see in the picture. But one of the consequences is that those of us who work here have to listen politely to people praising us, very sincerely -- but in terms that we would never choose ourselves.

This morning's Today programme was a case in point. The final item had  David Starkey (who read history at Fitzwilliam College) and Jim Al-Khalili (a physicist from the University of Surrey) waxing lyrical on the achievements of the last 800 years.

To be fair, Starkey made some really good points about Cambridge's excellence being dependent on money, and that goes for Arts subjects as much as for Science. It's easy to see how much modern science equipment costs, but think of the many centuries of investment in the University Library, on which my kind of work depends.

And he had a great peroration on 'access'. Cambridge is about 'excellence for everybody'...'the Marks and Spencers of universities' (only more successful)...and it's 'the place you go if you're bright'. Nothing else matters.

Hear, hear, I was thinking.

So why did I cringe?

Well for a start -- the facts, dear boy

Got by a speed camera

I have just been got by a speed camera. It was a fair cop. How could it not be? The camera never lies. But it still didn't FEEL entirely fair.

The crime in question took place in the lovely village of Woodstock, where I had been on an away day/night with my Leverhulme research project. For those who don't know it, Woodstock is a charming and rich village just outside Oxford -- just next to the Duke of Marlborough's stately pile at Bleinheim.  On this visit, I discovered that His Grace charges a whacking four quid just to walk in his park (you cant get into he house itself in January). His forelock-tugging servants on the cash desks hadn't heard of the 'right to roam'. But more of that on another time.

Why did it feel unfair?

Give me Al-Jazeera English - not BBC World News

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am one of the BBC’s biggest fans. They can rig as many games shows as they like, so far as I’m concerned (did anyone ever think the competitions were real and fair  anyway?) . They can swear on air at the most innocent of pensioners. It is a small price to pay for a national broadcasting service that is the best in the world.

Anyone who feels their loyalty to the Beeb wobbling a little should try four months in the USA – where you can surf through fifty TV stations without finding something worth watching, and where the impecunious Public Broadcasting radio stations make a valiant effort but are not a patch on Radio 4. There is nothing like In Our Time anywhere else, nor anything like the Today programme (whose lustre would be further enshrined, in my view, if it retained the services of Mr Stourton – just to come late into this old controversy).

If the Labour government, or its successor, starves the BBC into commercialism it will have committed the century’s biggest crime against British culture (and there are plenty of crimes to choose from …ID cards, detention without trial, school testing, etc. etc.).

So you know where I stand.

But even I think that there is an occasional Achilles heel in this otherwise glorious edifice. BBC World News, watched – or rather not watched – in hotel rooms across the world, is one such heel.

Harry and the 'Paki': why all the fuss?

For once I find myself half on Prince Harry’s side. I realise that he has not got an entirely clean political record and I can’t bear the flutter of admiration for our ‘hero’ as soon as the young man sets foot anywhere near a war zone.

But this outrage about the ‘Paki’ video is all a bit muddled. And it’s got the wrong target.

The video is, of course, frightful in its blokeish way; and it reveals exactly the kind of juvenile humour that you might expect from a group of young army officers (it’s probably a reflection of the kind of camaraderie that allows you to go on and kill people when you have to – so perhaps we shouldn’t entirely knock it?).

That said, I rather enjoyed Harry’s spoof phone call in front of his friends to his granny (HM The Queen). “God Save You” he finished. This showed a certain self-ironising that I hadn’t expected. I’d always assumed that the royals took all this mumbo jumbo completely seriously. May be they wont be so upset when we decide to abolish it all, then.

But what was so offensive?

The pleasure of Sudan

Some years ago, I invited three of my retired colleagues who had studied in Rome in the 1930s to talk to a group of undergraduates about the experience. We had all expected reminiscences about Mussolini, Romanita and the fascist exploitation of archaeology. Not a bit of it. Of very different political views, from communist to Tory wet, they were all full of excitement about the archaeology and claimed not to have noticed Mussolini pretending to be the emperor Augustus or the Roman-style parades.

At the time, it felt  rather like listening to people's holiday reminiscences from some seaside resort governed by a nasty dictator. "Well we know that there are some civil rights problems, but the people were all so friendly."

Well, I'm now going to get pretty close to that old cliche myself. I'm not about to come out in support of President Bashir (except to say that, when the West chooses to excoriate some unpleasant political regime, there is usually another side of the story if we take the trouble to find out -- take Serbia, for example...).

It goes without saying that Sudan has terrible problems. The plucky, "South-focussed", daily Khartoum Monitor -- which fills up spare space with Wiki articles: we're now on Part 4 of "Edmund Burke" -- published a nice editorial on New Year's day lamenting the fact that Sudan was the first African state to gain independence from British rule, but the last to enjoy it.

You find war, hunger, internal refugees living in dreadful conditions, threats (and more than threats) of terrorism and -- in Khartoum -- the beginning of the worst kinds of modernization (with Gulf and Chinese money -- thanks to the US economic boycott of the country).

It is also true that the people are extraordinarily friendly and helpful (often explicitly saying how much  they want to meet the English), and the archaeology is tremendous.

Yesterday we went to see the find spot of one ofthe most famous statues of the emperor Augustus ever, and one I am always teaching: the so-called Meroe Head, now in the British Museum.

General Gordon's piano -- and Byzantium in Khartoum

One of the occupational hazards (or pleasures, depending on how you see it) of being married to a Byzantinist is that you spend many hours, almost wherever you are, visiting and photographing Byzantine churches. I thought I would escape that in Khartoum. But no, Byzantium reaches even this far.

The husband is here on the search of the architecture of Robert Weir Schultz (1860-1951), a devoted recorder of Byzantine monuments, and an architect in a style best described as 'Byzantine meets Arts and Crafts'. In particular, he was the architect of the (colonial) Anglican cathedral in Khartoum, opened in 1912. It was based, loosely, on the architecture of the church of St Demetrios in Thessaloniki.