A Don’s Life

Reviewing the reviews

People occasionally ask me if they should reply to some published review of their book which they think is wrong, unfair, unprofessional . . .  or downright outrageous. I'm usually a bit ambivalent. The best advice to a friend always has to be "No, don't write an outraged letter of complaint to the editor, setting the record straight". The reason is simple, it will only draw attention to the offending review, which most people in the world will not have noticed anyway (who ever scrutinises a review as carefully as the author of the book concerned?). "If you must write, then make it witty, not hurt. But it's better to claim the highground in other ways, like inviting the reviewer to lunch to talk about it, all nice as pie..." 

Yet wearing my more journalistic hat, I must confess that I do rather like to see a good dispute between the reviewed and the reviewer in the letters pages, with the battalions of supporters drawn up on either side. And there is a sense that if someone has said something simply wrong in a review, then they should be called to account.

The more general question that this raises, though, is what makes a "good" review from the point of view of the person being reviewed anyway -- as I've had a cause to reflect over the last few weeks with the reviews of my Confronting the Classics. All the more so,  as it is a book that is actually grounded in a series of reviews. 

(Fear not, this isn't going to turn into a gripe; overall I'm pretty damn happy.) 

Opening Pompeii

I went last night to the opening of the Pompeii show at the BM. Boris J did the main speech, addressing us as docti and doctissimae (maybe something of a comedown after his opening of the Hadrian show, when he did the whole thing in both Latin and English). He was extremely funny, though in truth 12 hours later I have entirely forgotten the jokes (which may I suspect be indicative about BoJo's staying power).

The exhibition is really excellent and worth the visit -- partly because of the greatest hits it includes (like the picture above) but partly it has such a lot of the stuff that is not on display in Italy. That's to say, if you have been lucky enough to visit Pompeii a few times, there is still plenty here that you wont have seen.

Can you undo "damnatio memoriae"?

For as long as I can remember, I've taken students and friends in Rome, to see a great example of modern "damnatio memoriae". That's to say when an unpopular Roman emperor finally died or was disposed of, it was not uncommon for people to take a chisel to the inscriptions that bore his name and hack it out.

It was an ambivalent exercise -- because, of course, as you see on this stone from which the name of Geta has been removed, it both removed the name and drew attention to its removal.

Anyway, I have often had fun using the modern inscription at the top as a great example of the practice of "damnatio" still going on in the mid twentieth century. It's the inscription from the square in Rome that Mussolini erected around his reconstructed Mausoleum of Augustus. And it orginally read, in Latin "This place, where the spirit of Augustus flits through the air, after the emperor's Mausoleum had been excavated from the darkness of the ages and the scattered fragments of the Altar of Peace had been restored, Mussolini il Duce had the old narrow lanes demolished, and ordained that it <ie the place> should be embellished with more splendid streets, building and monuments suitable to the character of humanity. 1940, 18th year of the Fascist Republic."

But as you can just see at the top, after the fall of il Duce, someone came along and defaced the thing, removing the letters "..lini dux", to leave only "Musso" which is Italian slang for donkey. A nice "damnatio" joke.

New pope? New Roman emperor?

 

A comment from Roy Lewis on the last post reminded us that the claims that Pope John Paul I had been "eliminated" were not unlike all the rumours about the suspicious deaths of Roman emperors. They may have died (like John Paul I) in the their beds, but that didnt stop the rumours of murder by smothering or poisoned mushrooms or whatever taking hold.

It made me think that the first weeks of a new Pope were much more like the first weeks of a new Roman emperor than the first weeks of a new Prime Minister or President are.  It is not a question of going off and making your mark in parliament, winning votes or whatever. It's a question of establishing a relationship with the people/worshippers -- and of balancing that with making the right impression with the elite of the Catholic hieracrchy.

I am right now in Italy. And many people I have met have been dead keen on Papa Francesco. They have loved the idea that he appeared on the balcony of St Peter's and said "have a good lunch". It has also gone down well that he talked to his fellow cardinals as "brother cardinals", and that he rejected the papal limo and went almost incognito to visit a friend in hospital.

My first instinct was to think: what a nice guy. My second instinct was to think: what an excellent PR machine.

The "King of Nemi": how long does it take the penny to drop?

I am about to go off to Italy (on a recce for a possible tv programme, and for more honourable reasons). And I have been thinking about the about the story of the Rex Nemorensis, which memorably starts Frazer's Golden Bough. This was the priest of Diana at Nemi (just outside Rome, nicely imaged above) whose succession was distinctively violent. You could only become the priest of Diana at that particular site if you killed the previous incumbent.

The story was that Caligula (the "mad" emperor Gaius) insisted on a change of regime at Nemi, and hired an adversry to unseat the reigning king. And this was what Frazer had fixed onto in thinking about the primitive divine kingship with which he was so preoccupied.

But isnt there another way of seeing this?

More on the use of lectures

The IPPR think-tank has just published a report on the future of universities. It's wide ranging and far from stupid. But the focus of most reporting was on the idea of lectures, and how time expired they basically were.

Why, if you can see Niall Ferguson on your laptop, would you bother to turn up to hear Dr MuchLessFamous in the lecture theatre itself?

I'm all for raising this question, but I was suprised that noone in the reports of the report that I heard or read, or in the document itself, made any defence of the traditional lecture.

Nor did they ask what we thought lectures were for.

Please can I open the window?

I'd better start by saying that in broad terms I am very strongly behind "robust" planning laws, and I think that the Tory suggestions of watering these down are ikely to lead to towns and cities that we don't want to live in or much look at. Likewise, inconvenient as it may be to have the Building Inspector round, I have no doubt the Building Regs are a good thing . . . if they only catch the occasional rogue contractor skimping on the foundations, that has to be worthwhile. (And I should point out that they are no new idea; they go back at least to the emperor Nero after the fire of Rome.)

My complaint is only a little one: I dont see why it couldn't be up to me to decide, if I live near a road, whether I want to have double glazing or windows that will open for a bit of "fresh" air.

The art of smart criticism

Over the last few weeks I've had plenty of opportunity to reflect on how principled disagreement can get morphed into crude abuse. That is to say, when I say something about migration with which some people I disagree, quite a few people on social media decide to say that I am "stupid" or "evil" or a "disgrace to the academy" or whatever. Hang on, I think. We disagree... that doesn't mean that I am nasty/ignorant (nor you), it means we disagree.

And I'm not the only recipient of this stuff. Maybe I have missed the irony here (dont think so), but there was a blog by John Rentoul recently which criticised the London Review of Books' stance on Israel. Fair enough, it's hard to see a single good line on this one.  But the idea that the paper's stance made the LRB editor Mary-Kay Wilmers "evil" (as Rentoul put it it) seems bonkers to me. Since when has expressing or supporting a different view meant you are "evil"? Wrong maybe, or controversial or whatever. but "evil"?(And since when has "Mary-Kay Wilmers" been an anagram of "Cruella de Vill"?)

One of the main arts of criticism surely rests in part on a sense of humour... and on sticking the knife in in a way that the victim would see the point, and possibly grin. Unless you make an impact on the person criticised, what's the point?

This happened to me recently. 

Getting to grips with Tolstoy

I have been spending the weekend some way off my usual patch. When my editor Peter Carson died in January, he had just finished, literally the day before he died, translating Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych and Confession for a US publisher (Norton). It will come out later in the year and I am to write the Introduction.

Don't worry, I am not getting above myself. There is also to be a more specialist essay from a Russian expert. My job is to set the scene  -- and also to celebrate, and discuss, Peter's role as translator (on which I have quite a lot of interesting stuff). All the same I thought I needed to do a bit more background work on books concerned and their author. Up to now, my knowledge of Tolstoy has been like many people's I imagine: that is to say, some familiarity with War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and rather less interest in the spiritual, pacificist, social reformer that came later -- in the period when both Ilych and Confession were written.

So I've done a day and half's immersion therapy (with more to come), and of course -- as always happens -- I have begun to regret that I haven't been more interested in all this before.