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

‘And the wrong words make you listen In this criminal world’ Fantastic Voyage, David Bowie I remember when Michael Foot died and, given that he was in was in his nineties and the BBC had clearly had a fair old whack of time to plan his obituary, the announcement was immediately followed by a slew of… Read More Fantastic Voyage: Musik und Politik

Oscar Wilde said, wrongly, ‘there is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not to be talked about’. I think in our times of the unexpected becoming the normal, this adage needs an update: ‘there is only one thing worse than it is happening, and that is us failing to learn… Read More False Narratives

I don’t want to get overdramatic, but are we actually witnessing the end of the world?