Peter Thonemann

Andrew O’Hagan writes about his mother’s fear of pausing the TV while watching Coronation Street, in case she paused it for the whole nation (LRB, 21 April). In the early fifth century BC, when the new technology of writing was just taking off, the small Greek city of Teos set up on stone an inscribed oath of office, to be recited in public several times each year by the city’s magistrates. The...