Mary Beard

Evelyn Waugh was characteristically unimpressed by the remains of the prehistoric Minoan palace at Knossos and its famous decoration. His 1930 travelogue, Labels, contains a memorable account of his disappointment, not so much at the excavation site itself (‘where,’ he writes archly, ‘Sir Arthur Evans … is rebuilding the palace’) but at its collection of prize...

In September 1978, on a night train from Milan, I was forced to have sex with an architect on his way to the site of a biscuit factory he was designing somewhere outside Naples (or so he claimed). It’s a simple enough story. I was a graduate student, changing trains at Milan, and laden with luggage for a term’s research in Rome. There were a couple of hours to wait for the most convenient train south, so I went to the station bar on the look-out, I suppose, for an opportunity to wheel out my still very faltering Italian. The architect was there, on the look-out, too, presumably. Discovering that I had no couchette for the journey, he insisted on trying to book one for me; he took my ticket (which I meekly gave him), returned triumphant and then helped me with my cases and backpack to the train. Predictably enough as it now seems (though I’m sure I didn’t foresee it at the time), what he had actually booked was a two-berth first-class wagon lit. He bundled me in, took off my clothes and had sex, before departing to the upper bunk. I woke a few hours later just outside Rome to find him on top of me again, humping away – taking his last chance before handing me over to the sleeping-car steward to deposit on the platform, while he no doubt slept on to Naples. The only face I have chosen to remember (or perhaps re-create) from the whole incident belongs to this steward, the sly and uncomfortably knowing face of a man who had recognised exactly what was going on and had seen it all before, many times. As he pressed a small plastic cup of coffee into my hand in a routine way, I could tell that it would have been useless appealing to him for help, even if I’d had the chance.’

Noel Annan will be best remembered for Our Age, his grand, confident and sometimes very funny memoir written in the late 1980s, looking back at that generation of the British élite which came of age between the two world wars and so (as the book’s subtitle claimed) ‘made postwar Britain’. Here he reflected on their social connections, their shifting political and intellectual priorities, their sexual preferences, and their apparently glittering careers. Annan’s own achievements within this group have been rehearsed in the many obituaries which followed his death in February this year: Provost of King’s College, Cambridge at the age of 39, Provost of University College London, first full-time Vice-Chancellor of the University of London, author of the ‘Annan Report’ on the future of broadcasting, Chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery, Director of Covent Garden and so on; ‘a fine exemplar of the civilisation he portrays’, as Roy Jenkins wrote in a review of author and book together.‘

Tombs do not rank high in the history of modern architecture. Only two grave monuments in London have been designated as Grade One Listed Buildings: the icon of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery, and the aggressively idiosyncratic construction that is the memorial to the family of Sir John Soane (‘architect to the Bank of England &c &c &c’, as the inscription proclaims) in the burial ground next to Old St Pancras Church – the romantic spot where Shelley first caught sight of Mary Godwin, but now part of some lugubrious gardens sandwiched between the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, the mainline railway and St Pancras Coroner’s Court. ‘Listing’ has done little to protect either monument. Predictably perhaps, Marx’s tomb has suffered over the years from the hammers and spray guns of both enemies and friends. But Soane’s has fared even worse; not, I imagine, at the hands of desperate architectural ideologues, but from run-of-the-mill vandals, attracted by its sheer oddity. When I visited it in January, it was overrun by brambles; much of its balustrading had been kicked away; its four white marble columns had long since been heaved off (the nearby railway line their likely destination); and the temporary metal fence surrounding it was more of an eyesore than a protection.’‘

One good thing about volcanic eruptions is that they rarely come without warning. Days or weeks of insistent rumbling, smoke pouring ever more energetically from the crater, followed by a few light drizzles of ash, are usually enough to ensure that all those with common sense, determination and some means of transport have fled to safety hours before the lava starts to flow or the pumice to rain. That was certainly the case in Pompeii in 79 AD. The ash incinerated the city in an instant, but several days of earth tremors and the appearance of a mushroom cloud above Vesuvius on the morning of the eruption had given a clear signal of what was to come. The notoriously ghoulish Pompeian ‘corpses’ (in fact, plaster casts of the dead made by the ingenious process of injecting plaster of Paris into the cavity left by the decomposing flesh) represent only a tiny minority of the town’s population: the procrastinators; the fatalists; the unlucky; those in the wrong place at the wrong time (the richly dressed woman, for example, found in the gladiatorial barracks, her mind presumably on other things); the poor with no means to escape; the slaves with no option; the dogs still chained up at the doors. The most famous victim – Pliny the Elder, insufferable polymath and author of a vast encyclopedia of natural history – lost his life in a foolhardy attempt to get a better view of the catastrophe. The rest – and that was the vast majority of the inhabitants – had taken their valuables and left.’‘