Sandwell Council recently advertised for a ‘Thematic Liaison Manager (Performance)’ at £41,000 a year. Sandwell Council recently advertised for a ‘Thematic Liaison Manager (Performance)’ at £41,000 a year. It would be instructive if any reader could tell from that description what the job entailed. I doubt anyone could, and thereby hangs a tale. Latin was
‘On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.’ So said President Obama on his inauguration. ‘On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations
President-elect Obama (as I write) is preparing his inaugural, and it will doubtless display the same persuasive charm and intelligence that has characterised all his speeches. ‘Change’, ‘belief’ ‘opportunity’, ‘freedom’, ‘hope’, ‘equality’, ‘rights’ and ‘listening to the people’ will be qualified by ‘responsibility’ and ‘challenge’. ‘Yes, we can’ may become ‘Yes, we can, but only
The Today programme would call her iconic, but since she is a 16.1cm gold and ivory (‘chrys-elephantine’) statuette, it would not be saying much. She stands there, erect, shoulders back, thrusting forward impressive bare breasts (one nipple the tip of a golden nail), both hands holding snakes that, twined round her arms, stretch outwards from
Andrew Motion’s tenure as Poet Laureate is about to end, and the search for a successor has begun. It is accompanied with the usual tidal wave of claptrap about this not being ‘the sort of job which any real poet would want’ and the importance of not involving public opinion in the choice. What is
In the last two columns we have considered Barack Obama as novus homo and orator. But what about his mixed race? The racist seeks the cause for the differences between groups of people in either physiological or genetic determinism. The resulting characteristics are unalterable and define them as inherently inferior. But are prejudice, xenophobia and
It is no coincidence that the rules of persuasive public speaking were being formulated by Greeks in the 5th century bc when real democracy was in its first flush in Athens; for if a man was to be given the chance to take an active part in open debate in the assembly, he must know
It is a relief that there is one magazine in which one will not be hauled up on a charge of libel or sexual harassment for writing that Barack Obama, the President-elect of the United States, is a novus homo. So too was the 1st-century bc Roman orator, philosopher and politician Cicero, and he never
Last time we saw that the Romans did not have anything like a banking system i.e. a machinery for creating credit through various negotiable instruments. What they did have was minted coin — and that was the sole monetary instrument. So at a personal level, if you wanted money, you went to a rich friend and
In the banking chaos, we should recall the words of the American president Thomas Jefferson: ‘The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a grand scale.’ There was no such swindling in the ancient world because minted coin was the sole monetary instrument,
A group of 200 pagan worshippers gathered recently at the Parthenon to beg Athena not to allow material to be removed from her temple and relocated in the new, specially designed museum nearby. The goddess was obviously not impressed. One cannot blame her. The ancient relationship between men and gods was perfectly reflected in the
The military-backed President Musharraf of Pakistan has been dragged, screaming and kicking, into retirement. He doesn’t know how lucky he is. How power maddens people! In 5th-century bc democratic Athens, on average two out of the top ten officials every year were found guilty on a capital charge and either fled or were executed. It
Apparently some scientists believe that the patterns in which bumblebees search for food — ‘geographic profiling’ is the technical term — could help detectives hunt down serial killers. The ancients would not have been surprised. It is largely to Virgil in the final book of his ‘farming-manual’ Georgics (c. 29 bc) that we owe our
Last time we saw how Socrates and Plato were among the majority of ancient thinkers who supported the ‘creationist’ theory of the world. But there was an ‘anti-creationist’ lobby too, led by the 5th-century Athenian atomists Leucippus and Democritus. Not that they set out to oppose the creationists; it was just that their understanding of
The debate between creationists and anti-creationists is nothing new. As David Sedley shows in his extraordinarily interesting Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (Cambridge), it raged as strongly in the ancient world as it does in the modern. The ancients were, for the most part, creationists. The big debate for them was what happened next,
The Anglican bishops have met and reached their grave conclusions on a number of doubtless vital issues — except one. What about the Olympic Games? Are they not pagan rituals? And was it not for that excellent reason that the Church banned them? It was Constantine the Great, founder in ad 324 of Constantinople as
The recent exchange of the bodies of two Israeli soldiers for five living Hezbollah (and much else) has produced outrage in some sections of the Israeli press. Admittedly, it lays Israel open to further blackmail from Hezbollah who, glowing with high-minded idealism, long to capture and murder as many Israeli soldiers as they can. But
The recent return of the bodies of two Israeli soldiers in exchange for five living Hezbollah prisoners exemplifies one of the most deep-rooted human feelings: that the dead must come home. At one level, it seems irrational. What do the dead care? But as the ancients knew, it is not the dead who count in
Whether Muslims want elements of sharia law to have the force of civil law or not (not, it is argued in last week’s Spectator), the principle of different jurisdictional codes existing side by side has been with us for thousands of years. The general principle of private settlement of disputes, on any terms agreeable to
We are happy that terrorist suspects be held for 28 days without charge. So there is no problem about the principle. But the government now wishes to extend this to 42 days, and all hell breaks loose. But on what grounds? Since the principle of holding without charge has been established, the time-scale is neither