Of all the characters in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Louis strikes the modern reader as the most archaic, at least at first glance. An Australian only child, thrown into the absurd moeurs of elite English education, he is plagued his whole life by the insecurity that he does not belong, that he just doesn’t, and… Read More Making Waves: A Study of Boris Johnson

The British Museum, which traditionally uses its summer months to display a wide-ranging, easy-to-follow main exhibition focused on a topic popular with laymen both British and from abroad (cf Pompeii and Herculaneum, Ming Dynasty China and Vikings), seems to have gone a little off-piste this year. A display, I kid you not, curated by Ian… Read More Snowflakes Beware: Review of Rodin and the art of ancient Greece at the British Museum

Trite observations on a new genre of short film. There is an excellent rabbit hole of Youtube dedicated to the analysis and appreciation of (largely early noughties) animation available. From sustained forty minute long-breakdowns of how The Simpsons died (hint: it was long before Maud Flanders), to any number of so-called ‘video essays’ on certain… Read More YouTube Existentialism: Tom, Jerry and Shiloh Dynasty.

As a grad student, I wrote a study of the Tiberius Cup, now in the Louvre, originally found in the silver hoard of a villa at Boscoreale, near Pompeii. The cup depicts a triumph of the (future) Emperor Tiberius, and is the only known realistic depiction of this archetypal Roman event in the whole corpus… Read More Anti-clockwise; Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural at the Ashmolean Museum

Happy New Year! 2016 is over – loudly sing cuckoo! 2017, however, doesn’t show any great sign of improvement thus far though – Trump (remember him?) is still going to become President, Brexit (what that?) is going to happen and celebrities keep on dying. Admittedly, Graham Taylor’s death has not caused me nor the wider public… Read More Annus Horribilis

Abraham Lincoln was killed laughing. We must pray the same fate doesn’t befall us.

In 1992, Francis Fukuyama declared that we were witnessing ‘the End of History’. As a 93 birth myself, I think I am well entitled to be a tad dismissive of this pronouncement. Rwanda, Kosovo, 9/11, Iraq and the Arab Spring all looked like history, for example, and I think the last year has perhaps seen… Read More Eschatologia