A Don’s Life

How to read a Latin poem, the ancient Booker -- and other Cheltenham events

I have just got back from the Cheltenham Literature Festival -- and from the start of the Classics "strand" which worked better than I could ever have hoped (there is still a "heroines" debate next week, if you are near Cheltenham and up for some high-fibre entertainment). I've already trailed this, so apologies for any repetition... but it has now actually happened.

First off, on Saturday, was that discussion I mentioned between Kevin MacDonald and Maria Wyke about the forthcoming movie, Eagle - based on the Rosemary Sutcliff novel. This went really well, I thought, because both Maria and Kevin were prepared to play and engage with the audience -- and in Kevin's case to talk frankly about how he had changed the original story and why (like the relationship between Marcus and Esca becoming less deferential and more edgy, and the virtual disappearance from the movie of Cottia -- the only possible heterosexual love interest in the original book). For me this was an eye opener onto adapting a book for the screen. (No less fascinating was people's recollection of old BBC versions on both radio and tv, which had stuck in their memory more firmly, I think, than the book itself.)

 Saturday evening turned out to be a big prequel to an even bigger day on Sunday -- with two classical events. The first was the high risk discussion of two Latin poems, Catullus and Horace. I guess this is what I am most proud of -- because it would have been so easy to get it wrong (and dull). But we managed to go through the poems in such a way that I felt I saw more in them than I ever had before, and honestly I thought we had 250 people really gripped. One of the reasons it worked so well was that the Horace (the Plancus Ode, ie Odes 1, 7) looks pretty rebarbative at first sight, full of proper names and myths you havent heard of. Just the kind of thing that puts people off Latin poetry, in English or in Latin. But give it half an hours and it is quite easy to see what is going on, and why. (In fact one of the questins we dealt with was, quite how bookish and learned this all was for Roman readers too.)

So thank you Llew and Peter. I'd love to hear reactions from anyone who was there.

And finally, as some of you who could not be there have asked me to post, who won the ancient Booker prize?

The (slightly boring) Blair interview

I was in the TLS office this afternoon, but rushed off smartish to catch the 5.45 and watch the Blair interview on telly at home. That's illogical I know -- as I could perfectly well have recorded it/watched it on iplayer or whatever -- but there is still something alluring in the idea of sitting at home and watching a television programme at the same time as millions of others, even if you are nowhere near them (it's a sort of 'virtual community').

Of course, I knew that it would feel like a book promotion exercise -- but two things had tickled my curiosity.

First, I had been intrigued by the "Blair and alcohol" stories from the book on the news this morning. I had always taken TB to be a Perrier water and rocket salad kind of guy -- but the idea that he was (like the rest of us over busy over-50s) a GandT plus half a bottle of wine made him seem much more interesting. (And remember what doctors are always told...or so I'm told ... take what they admit to and then double it...)

Second, there had been a curious item in the Sky tv guide about the interview:

"Questions like, "What did you have for breakfast this morning?" and "Do you think Mary Beard is the new Su-Bo?" won't feature in this tussle between the former Prime Minister and adorable political elf Andrew Marr."

For about 5 seconds, I managed to convince myself that this might just be flattering (if it really was referring to me, that is). You know ... Mary Beard will make ancient Pompeii as appealing to millions on the telly as Susan Boyle made... whatever it was she made apealing. Realism soon suggested, however, that the implication was much more likely along the lines of "how does a slightly weird over 50 year old think she can inflict herself on us", with more than a hint of allegations of social inadequacy!

But, anyway, it got me racing home for the interview, which was probably a mistake.

From Cuba with love?

I posted my first post from Cuba about the classical heritage because I wanted to give myself a bit of time to think about what I saw. But -- with a few honourable exceptions -- most commenters have homed in on the "Cuba right or wrong?" question.

So? What do I think? Well -- the first answer is that no 4-day tourist is in any place to judge. I have no clue how to weigh up the supposed evils of Batista versus the supposed evils of Castro; and I hear, but can't evaluate, the anti-Castro stuff on the web. The Huffington Post has its own special Cuba page, which is worth a look.

So, that apart, I think it's a question of what strikes you. And on that score, there's  lot to be said for, and about, Cuba.

Classics in Cuba

I have been rather off radar because, as I hinted in my last post, I went with the family to Cuba for a few days -- a brief visit, but one driven by the desire to see the place before Fidel died and before Obama loosened it up to the United States (before, I mean, there was a GAP on every street corner). We couldn't, it seems, put it off much longer.

I shall report on some of the surprises soon. But lets start with the biggest of all. I never expected to see so much classical tradition, and classics around the place. At the top of this post is a a wonderful little 1828 classical revival temple from one of the main squares in the city (the Rough Guide claimed it was a miniature replica Parthenon, which it isn't -- but it still is a great piece of, archaeologically inspired,colonial classicism).

And there was more than just that. We missed the vast statue of Athena (the world's third largest indoor statue) in the Capitolio -- a 1920s building closed for renovation, but externally bearing an unnerving resemblance to the Capitol in Washington DC (on the right, from our hotel bedroom). But in the front hall spanking new university building (which looks, I have modestly  to say, a rather pricier piece of architecture than our own recent Faculty extension) was a somewhat smaller version of the cult statue of Athena from the Parthenon.

There were also a good deal of original antiquities around the place -- from pots, to paintings and sculpture. Most of these I am afraid I cant illustrate as photography was often not officially allowed , and I hadn't quite mastered the technique of buying the blindness of the guards.

Don't do Art History

When I whinged about the cost of reproducing a photo (taken by the husband) of the inside of the new Acropolis Museum, I had forgotten the other stresses and strains of illustrating an academic book or article -- that is, time, frustration and bafflement.

The money is one thing, but when you start to calculate just how long it takes to find a picture that you are allowed (for fee or not) to reprint, at the right level of resolution, and showing more or less what you want it to show -- well, my estimate is that you are looking at one day per image.

OK -- people who write really popular books have picture researchers -- battalions of (usually) ladies, who "source" the images and arrange the copyright fees to reproduce. It's a full time job. Most of the rest of us do it ourselves (though in my case I am lucky enough to have an assistant to share the burden). However the work is organised, next time you pick up an illustrated book, you can reckon it will have taken 8-10 hours to find and get permission for every picture in it.

I am just now finishing an article -- or rather chapter of a collaborative volume -- to be published by CASVA; it's on the nineteenth-century 'visitor experience' of Pompeii. There are about 15 illustrations. And me and Debbie ("the assistant") are about half way through the 15 days it's going to take.

So why exactly does it take so long?

How much does a picture of the Parthenon cost?

How can we keep the Greek economy afloat? Well, one answer is by asking for permission to reproduce pictures from Greek museums.

Just recently I produced a new edition of my Parthenon book, brought up to date with a new chapter on the new Acropolis Museum (plus all the to-ing and fro-ing about the Elgin Marbles in the years since the first edition came out).

I am quite a fan of the inside of the new Museum, and so wanted to illustrate it in my book. Just a couple of weeks after the museum opened, the husband visited and took some photos. It turned out to be a small window of opportunity -- within a few days, photography was banned through all the Museum except the Parthenon Gallery; a few weeks after that the whole Museum was a no-go zone to cameras.

Anyway, I had a nice picture of the frieze as displayed in Athens, taken by the husband, which I wanted to reproduce in my book. My publishers did the proper thing and wrote to the Museum, explaining that we had a picture to reproduce, and asking what  the fee would be .. for black and white, inside image, world rights, with a print run of 7500 (well let's hope we need more, but that is the current number).

What do you guess it was?

Question Time . . . "and the prize for the prettiest panellist goes to . . ."

Last Thursday I was a panellist on Question Time, the tv equivalent of Any Questions and just a bit more scary. That's partly because it's television and so if you make an idiot of yourself, it's entirely VISIBLE (though it is slightly pre-recorded so if you commit libel or blasphemy, they can cut it out). And it's partly because it's a bit more hard line politically, so presumably just a bit edgier for the professional politicians on the panel.

Actually (and predictably enough you may say) I much enjoyed it, as well as being terrified. Like Any Questions, it's rather like doing exams -- which I also remember with a combination of pleasure and fear. You have to question spot, do your revision, get your facts sorted in your head. The difference is that in the case of Question Time, the revision consists in reading all the newspapers I don't usually get time for (or wouldn't want to be caught reading), not in mugging up the set texts.

There's also that familiar sense of annoyance when the revision comes to nothing. On this occasion I had invested several hours in mugging up the British football crisis. I knew the Tory proposals for bringing back competitive school sport (just think how awful that would be ... it was, remember, competitive school sports before the 1970s that put most of us OFF exercise).  And I knew what Fabio Capello earned, and what his possible severance deal was supposed to be -- and I had calculated the annual wages of the squad and how that compared to the annual grant of the British Museum (you can see what my point was going to be . . . why doesn't this country invest in what it is good at (art, music, culture), rather than football, which it isn't?

But the similarities only go so far. The other panelists didn't actually seem much like fellow candidates -- and  sprung some surprises.

Retirement parties -- and more on the trains (sorry)

In the old days, when I showed up at a retirement party, it was for someone who seemed very old -- a senior colleague whom I didn't know very well, or someone who had taught me. Now, retirement parties are for friends, who seem pretty much my age. And I find I have a quite different attitude to their style and choreography ('would I like this for me?' tends to be a question niggling at the back of my mind).

On Wednesday I went to the party for John House, who is leaving the Courtauld Institute after thirty odd years. He's on the far left in the picture (inter alia, he works on Monet and Manet -- hence the faint outline of the "Bar at the Folies Bergeres" you see in the background).

Anyway he can't have felt horribly old, because his old PhD supervisor (Alan Bowness, in the middle) also turned up to celebrate his pupil's retirement. You know that you are still young, so long as your old teachers are still walking the planet. (This actually reminded me of going to Frank Walbank's 90th birthday party a few years ago -- and his old Director of Studies was there to give a little speech. Imagine being 90 and still having your old DoS at your party.)

On this occasion one of the best stunts was a cever little elegy for the honorand, composed by John Lowden, on the right in picture.

To understand this properly, you need to know that the Courtauld used to be basedin Home House (pronounced Hume), before it moved to Somerset House, on the Strand; and that one of the keys to understanding Manet's "Bar at the Folies Bergeres" is the precise angle of the mirror...!

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The alibi for the trip to New York was a visit to the Metropolitan Museum. The husband is part of a team organising a Syria exhibition at the Royal Academy and wanted to look out some early Christian Syrian material and talk to the curators who might lend it (interestingly -- or horrifyingly -- it turns out that a Syrian exhibition would not be possible in the USA, as Bush's legislation about not dealing with terrorist states extends to cultural objects and projects). We also wanted to "do" the new Roman galleries in detail.

Let me say to start with that there is some fabulous stuff in these galleries -- and interestingly different from what you find in European collections. There are no big bits of 'state art' in New York... it's by and large smaller in scale, but almost everything would provide the subject for a whole lecture. It also shows the necessity of actually SEEING the the things you write about.The bronze image of the goddess Cybele pulled by lions in her chariot is often illustrated in books on Roman religion (including my own). I had never realised before that it was part of some water feature, with the lions' mouths acting as spouts. That makes it something rather different from the cult object it is usually assumed to be.

So the whole visit was tremendously worthwhile.  In particular the glass, like this gorgeous blue piece -- which I suspect, if one saw it in an antique shop, one would never guess was Roman. Eighteenth-century perhaps?

It made me think that if I was starting my research career all over again, I'd seriously consider going into ancient glassware.

But despite the tremendous riches, there were some problems. Notably some of the labels and information panels. Now, I know from experience that writing museum labels is much harder than people imagine -- and it is too easy to carp.

But the Met didn't come out very well.

Kings Cross to Cambridge: how nasty can a journey get?

I am afraid that this post will have most to say to those who travel by train between Kings Cross and Cambridge; but I suspect that my story will resonate with most other people who use London commuter  lines.

OK, first off Kings Cross -- and, I guess, a minor quibble. The underground station there serves both Kings Cross and St Pancras (now the Eurostar terminal). Until a few months ago, if you came into Kings Cross on the mainline train you went straight down to the tube -- and, within a minute or two, to whichever line (Northern, Circle, Piccadilly, Hammersmith and City) you fancied. The Eurostar-driven redevelopment of the station means that anyone wanting to get to (say) the Northern line from Kings Cross mainline station has now to walk through a labyrinthine series of passages by a circuitous route which seems to take you over to St Pancras, and then back to the relevant tube platform (10 minutes, briskly) -- even though you know the trains go from just underneath where you started out.

If anyone's worked out how to avoid this marathon, do let us know. I am sure there are some short cuts if you ignore al the forbidding notices saying "No entry to the Northern Line" or whatever (I think this means that there IS an entry to the Northern line this way, but we dont want you to use it.)

But the main whinge of this post (which is unashamedly a whinge) is the misery of the mainline train service, from Cambridge to London.