Classics
Boris’s waiting game
While the Labour party rakes over its past in an effort to find a policy for its future, the commentators…
Party-naming with Plato
In order to make a sensible choice of new leader, the Labour party is trying to work out what its…
Barometer
Gesture politics A royal home movie from 1933 apparently showed the future Queen, aged seven, and her mother giving a…
Vespasian vs Islamic State
As Ahmed Rashid argued last week, it is hard to see what the West is doing in the Middle East,…
Tsipras vs hubris
The EU finds it difficult to understand what drives the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Quite simply, he is a…
Solon vs Jean-Claude Juncker
The combination of terror and outrage with which Brussels has greeted Greek Prime Minister Tsipras’s referendum tells us everything we…
Hesiod on Grexit anxiety
Why do Greeks want to keep the euro, or remain in the European Union? The combative, creative, competitive, mercantile classical…
Trigger
A notion is going about that, just as readers of film reviews receive spoiler alerts, so readers of anything should…
Pliny the Younger on Fifa
In any huge enterprise (like Fifa), where does the rot begin? Pliny the Younger mused on this question in a…
The northern powerhouses of ancient Turkey
Government claims that it will ‘free’ northern cities to turn themselves into ‘powerhouses’. Since most of them are held by…
Start-up culture in Ancient Greece
Honduras wants to establish start-up cities to experiment with alternative economic, regulatory, and legal systems. Could this concept help stop…
Demosthenes vs Michael Fallon
Secretary of State for Defence Michael Fallon’s claim that Ed Miliband, having practised on his brother, would also stab his…
Voting for heroes
To judge from elections, the purpose of politics is to win power by promising to make people better off. Plato,…
Caesar, Pompey and the SNP
Alex Salmond, the ex-first minister who proved incapable of making Scotland independent, has assured the world that he and his…
Diary
I never knew classicists could be so scary! Last week I wrote a Telegraph article saying classics exams had been…
Rome’s 99 per cent
In the UK the richest 1 per cent — 300,000 — of the working population control 23 per cent of…
Allah, Zeus and the Church of England
A ‘prominent liberal cleric’ in London has held an Islamic prayer service in his church, St John’s Waterloo. ‘We all…
Greeks vs Greens
The Green party’s manifesto appears to make saving the planet only a small element in its otherwise painfully unoriginal agenda.…
Hyperides vs Jack Straw
In responding as they did to the Daily Telegraph ‘sting’, Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind may well have done…
What real debate looks like
Ancients would have been astonished that parties never debate against each other in open, public forum except on the telly…
Julius Caesar vs Isis
Isis disseminates videos of beheaded captives to spread simple terror. Julius Caesar knew all about it. In his diaries of…
Greek tragicomedy
The German chancellor Angela Merkel has expressed her desire for Greece to remain part of the European ‘story’. Since Greeks…
Socrates and Charlie Hebdo
What would the ancients have made of Charlie Hebdo? The First Amendment tolerates the expression of opinions, however offensive, but…
Law, democracy and rape
‘This was the rule for men that Zeus established: whereas fish, beasts and birds eat each other, since there is…
Oaths for MPs
Before taking their seats in Parliament, all MPs must swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen. Mark Durkan, MP…
