Harry Mount’s diary: Class war with classicists and wisdom from Brian Sewell

I never knew classicists could be so scary! Last week I wrote a Telegraph article saying classics exams had been dumbed down. It followed the news that Camden School for Girls — the last comprehensive in the country to teach Greek A-level — is planning to drop the subject in September. Soon after, the classics trolls came a-calling, on Facebook’s Classics International forum. The insults were impressively high-minded. A classics student at King’s College London called me an ‘antediluvian ape’. A classics teacher at Durham Sixth Form Centre predicted my next book would be ‘bowel-achingly derivative’.

My kind former tutor, Professor Greg Woolf, disagreed with my argument but flatteringly suggested I should become president of the Classical Association. That incensed Richard Wallace, a former classics lecturer at Keele. He compared the idea to the time he stopped Enoch Powell becoming the association’s president. I’m not remotely as well-qualified for the job as Powell.