Hugh Lloyd-Jones

Hugh Lloyd-Jones is Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University. His latest books, Blood for the Ghosts and Classical Survivals, will be reviewed here by M.I. Finley.

Facing both ways

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 19 August 1993

The Italian original of Bisexuality in the Ancient World appeared in 1988, and several new treatments of the topic have appeared since then. First, Kenneth Dover published in The Greeks and their Legacy, the second volume of his collected papers, an article in which he put the case against the theory, lately revived, that the favourable Greek attitude to homosexuality derived from a phase of history in which a young male was prepared for the rites de passage from which he would emerge as a full warrior by the tuition of an older male who was his lover. Further, the American scholar David Halperin published A Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990), a volume of essays in which he enthusiastically supports Foucault’s view that ‘homosexuality’ is a construction of Western culture that came into being only about a hundred years ago. These problems have also been discussed by another American scholar, the late John J. Winkler, a writer of great ability whose early death is much to be regretted. In The Constraints of Desire (1990) Winkler is mainly concerned with the position of women, but he contributed to Before Sexuality, a book of essays about ‘the construction of erotic experience in the ancient world’, an essay called ‘Laying Down the Law: The Oversight of Men’s Sexual Behaviour in Classical Athens’, in which he assesses the power of moral conventions regulating sexual activity in the Athens of the fourth century.

Letter

Manly Decency

23 April 1992

Professor Boris Ford (LRB, 23 April) thinks there is a Regius Chair of English at Cambridge. There is indeed a King Edward VII Chair of English Literature, founded, surprisingly enough, as a memorial to that monarch. But a Regius Chair is a chair founded by a king, and Edward VII did not found the chair. When its second holder, Q, was asked whether he did, he replied by quoting the one line of Wordsworth’s...
Letter

Non Grata

4 May 1989

No one who knows me will deny that I am a Conservative. Someone in New York once said: ‘If that man took another step to the right, he’d fall off the world.’ That is why I am writing to say how strongly I agree with the protests of Nicholas Penny (Diary, 4 May) and of Sir John Pope-Hennessy (New York Review of Books, 4 May) against the behaviour of the Government, the trustees whom it has imposed,...

What the Romans did

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 5 February 1987

Classical education is one thing, critical scholarship is another, and in his sketch of the history of Classical education in England, built around a detailed treatment of its three most celebrated figures, Professor Brink is concerned above all to describe and to make a case for the element of critical scholarship that Classical education may contain. Textual criticism is an important kind of critical scholarship, but it is not the only kind: one must discover what the authors actually wrote, but one must also determine the reliability of the documents and monuments surviving from the Ancient world.

Letter

The Oxford Vote

7 March 1985

SIR: Professor Pulzer (LRB, 7 March) is living in a dream world. The old Butskellite consensus for which he hankers could not continue, because the time came when the country had to realise that it must earn its living in a competitive world, and by its tolerance of the greedy and stupid oafs who were running the big trade unions the Butskellite consensus was making that impossible. I have suffered,...

Jesus Christie

Richard Wollheim, 3 October 1985

There are, I am sure, in the lives of all of us except perhaps the most low-spirited, some four or five people whom we cannot forgive. By this I do not mean anything necessarily moral. We...

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Modern Prejudice

M.I. Finley, 2 December 1982

Of the 53 short essays, book reviews, lectures and obituaries assembled in Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s two volumes, two were published in the year before he assumed the Regius Professorship of Greek...

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Tribute to Trevor-Roper

A.J.P. Taylor, 5 November 1981

The festschrift, a collection of essays in honour of a senior professor, used to be dismissed as a rather tiresome German habit. Now, I think, it has become embedded in English academic...

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