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“... unchallenged superiority of the well-born.’ Those epigrammatic generalisations, from the pens of Paul Veyne and Peter Brown, are fairly typical of the History of Private Life at its best: a book which makes the reader think, teasing and encouraging with spicy details, long views, a capacity for the unexpected insight. Now for something completely ...”

“... Syrian and Russian forces reoccupied the site in March. Ancient Palmyra now lies in ruins. Paul Veyne’s short, angry eulogy is dedicated to Khaled al-Asaad. Much of the book is a revision of an introduction to Palmyra Veyne first published 17 years ago, and it isn’t the place to find the latest specialist ...”

“... influence of Durkheim with its special emphasis on structures. Both Raymond Aron and more recently Paul Veyne admit the influence of the sociological methods of Dilthey, Simmel and Weber in underscoring the specificity of historical events. In De la Connaissance Historique H.-I. Marrou attacks the narrow concept of what constitutes historical ...”

“... awkwardness shows, I feel, in the phrase ‘family business’. A few decades ago the classicist Paul Veyne asked: ‘Did the Greeks believe in their myths?’ It’s a sharp contemporary question that the secular world puts to Christians, and to other religious followers. Rising secularisation on the one hand and combative congregations of different ...”

“... and death – as veneration. The will to believe such accounts can have terrible repercussions. Paul Veyne, the great classicist, wrote a justly celebrated book, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths?, in which he makes clear that we can’t know the answer. The literal, physical reality of aerial creatures, like that of divine creatures, has ...”

“... of detailed reconstructions of the erotic life of Romans and Greeks by such ancient historians as Paul Veyne and Kenneth Dover (whose authoritative book on Greek homosexuality Roger Scruton oddly, and without authority, dismisses as ‘trivialising’), but his interest is strictly in the origin of particular kinds of moral scruple, not in the incidence ...”

“... here: there is likely to have been an evolution in the political character of the liturgy, as Paul Veyne suggested in Chapter Two of Le Pain et le Cirque (1976). But de Ste Croix insists that it was specifically through the exploitation of slaves (rather than of free hired labour) that the Greek upper classes gained their surplus. So, first, how in ...”

“... that he stand back to form a full picture. It is instructive to compare him in this respect to Paul Veyne – another outstanding writer on ancient history, and like Finley steeped in modern social theory. In one of his insightful asides, Finley writes that ‘we might consider the Pont du Gard as a fantastically expensive way of bringing fresh water ...”

“... recent studies of non-rational (indeed often irrational) political behaviour. The first is Paul Veyne’s Le Pain et le Cirque,2 an analysis of civic giving in Classical Antiquity; the second Alexander Zinoviev’s The Yawning Heights,3 a satirical and penetrating work about politics and everyday life in the Soviet Union. ...”

“... lack of an intention to succeed. This last observation is also crucial to the marvellous work by Paul Veyne, Le Pain et le Cirque: but unlike Bourdieu Veyne makes it clear that the useful consequences of a disregard for useful consequences do not in any way explain that disregard. To discuss what distinguishes whom ...”

“... audience including, presumably, many straight readers. Perhaps a few more gay male writers – Paul Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise ...”