Thomas Meaney

‘My​ only talent is for comedy,’ Coetzee writes to himself. His writer’s diaries – six small notebooks he kept in the 1970s and 1980s, now housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin – are full of musings and mock preparations:

5 October 78. This man [the magistrate of Waiting for the Barbarians] is going to bore everyone. I will...

In​ 1957, in a remote village on the south coast of Bali, the young anthropologist Clifford Geertz was watching a cremation ceremony spill down a hillside when the crowd suddenly parted, ‘as in a DeMille movie’, and there, propped up on her walking stick, stood Margaret Mead. She was on her way to India for ‘a World Conference on some sort of World Problem’, and had...

One of the first things the Germans did after marching into Greece in 1941 was to resume the excavations that had been interrupted by the onset of war. Each sector of the military pitched in: the Luftwaffe photographed classical sites; the Wehrmacht cordoned off ruins; the Kriegsmarine salvaged pieces of an ancient frieze sunk near Piraeus. There were excited communiqués to Berlin: the...