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Things Keep Happening

Geoffrey Hawthorn: Histories of Histories, 20 November 2008

A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the 20th Century 
by John Burrow.
Allen Lane, 553 pp., £25, December 2007, 978 0 7139 9337 0
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What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe 
by Anthony Grafton.
Cambridge, 319 pp., £13.99, March 2007, 978 0 521 69714 9
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The Theft of History 
by Jack Goody.
Cambridge, 342 pp., £14.99, January 2007, 978 0 521 69105 5
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Thucydides and the Philosophical Origins of History 
by Darien Shanske.
Cambridge, 268 pp., £54, January 2007, 978 0 521 86411 4
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... begins, was conversing with Homer; Thucydides was responding rather less generously to Herodotus; Xenophon was continuing Thucydides; and so it went on. After the Roman historians of Alexander, Burrow proceeds to Rome itself, to Polybius, Sallust, Livy and Plutarch; to Appian and Cassius Dio on the civil war; to Tacitus and the self-serving Josephus, sensibly ...

The Authentic Snarl

Blake Morrison: The Impudence of Tony Harrison, 30 November 2017

The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966-2016 
by Tony Harrison, edited by Edith Hall.
Faber, 544 pp., £25, April 2017, 978 0 571 32503 0
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Collected Poems 
by Tony Harrison.
Penguin, 464 pp., £9.99, April 2016, 978 0 241 97435 3
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... on?’ (as in the barber asking the customer whether he wants gel on his hair) with ‘Xenophon’. But even when they’re clever, the rhymes are clunky. He wants us to hear the industry involved in his verse-making, the clatter of dialect and thud of monosyllables.Defiance isn’t always ‘ink-stained’. In his selected prose, Harrison ...

Laugh as long as you can

James Davidson: Roman Jokes, 16 July 2015

Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling and Cracking Up 
by Mary Beard.
California, 319 pp., £19.95, June 2014, 978 0 520 27716 8
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... to make an honest living. In return they would keep the conversation light and flatter the host. Xenophon introduces us to one such character, Philip, in his Symposium, a work of historical fiction written in c.365 BC. Philip stands on the threshold and announces that he is a laughter-maker (gelotopoios) and jokes that he came uninvited because he thought it ...

Wasp-Waisted Minoans

Miranda Carter: Mary Renault’s Heroes, 13 April 2023

‘The King Must Die’ and ‘The Bull from the Sea’ 
by Mary Renault.
Everyman, 632 pp., £16.99, October 2022, 978 1 84159 409 5
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... dry archaeological reports. For the curious and initiated she added, direct from the pages of Xenophon, Thucydides and Plato’s Phaedo, portraits of Socrates and Plato and a seamless rendering of their ideas on the individual’s moral obligations, and how to live under an unjust government.In her next novel, The King Must Die, she approached the ...

Flat-Nose, Stocky and Beautugly

James Davidson: Greek Names, 23 September 2010

A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names. Vol. V.A Coastal Asia Minor: Pontos to Ionia 
edited by T. Corsten.
Oxford, 496 pp., £125, March 2010, 978 0 19 956743 0
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... necessarily make sense when combined. Such ‘irrational names’ – Andrippos (‘Man-horse’), Xenophon (‘Strange[r]-Voice’) – would also have to include the name of Plato’s great-uncle, Kallaischros, a name possessed by a number of distinguished Athenians of the classical period, which sounded exactly like ‘Beautugly’. Doubtless even the most ...

In the Anti-World

Nicholas Jenkins: Raymond Roussel, 6 September 2001

Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams 
by Mark Ford.
Faber, 312 pp., £25, November 2000, 0 571 17409 4
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... to be suspended on tracks made from animal organs is itself knowledgably and sensitively foody: Xenophon claimed that the helots would have liked to eat the Spartans raw.) In fact, a simultaneous fascination and disgust with food is evident throughout Roussel’s writing. A little later in Impressions d’Afrique we meet a sculptor who has invented a ...

Mr and Mr and Mrs and Mrs

James Davidson: Why would a guy want to marry a guy?, 2 June 2005

The Friend 
by Alan Bray.
Chicago, 380 pp., £28, September 2003, 0 226 07180 4
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... The evidence he must discount, however, much of it from contemporaries, is overwhelming. Xenophon claimed that in Boeotian Thebes, ‘man and boy live together, like married people,’ in E.C. Marchant’s Loeb translation, or, more pedantically, Boeotian men ‘form relationships (homilousi) once they have been conjugally yoked (syzygentes) as man ...

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