On Monday, the Cambridge Union Society debated “This House would return the Parthenon Marbles to the New Acropolis Museum in Athens.” Sponsoring the debate was easyCruise. The travel company offers a Classical Greece cruise that includes a visit to the Acropolis, the tourist attraction bereft of most of its treasures. An Acropolis reunited […]

World Aids Day. I am reminded of the first time I ever heard of the mysteries of HIV. I was 15, a student in Year 10 at the bland and conservative Meriden School for Girls. It was summer and I was in a geography class with Mr Mawad who was droning on and on as […]

What interests me about all the noise surrounding the Antikythera Mechanism is the question of what would have been, I mean what would things be like now, what would the world look like, be like, had the technology that produced this mechanism not been lost.

Jo Marchant on Nature.com articulates the question:
I’m also interested in finding […]

Interesting piece in The Age about Kate Grenville’s The Secret River.
Novelist Kate Grenville has upset historians by claiming her Booker-shortlisted The Secret River is a new form of history writing.
…begins the report by Jane Sullivan. While researching the story, Grenville came across “dispatch from Governor Arthur Phillip, written a few months after the First […]

Public schools in Sratford (Connecticut) have discarded their old “cutesy, feel good” motto of “Children First - Whatever It Takes” and adopted words straight out of the Stoic philosopher’s mouth, reports Fred Musante via the Stratford Star. The new motto Tantum eruditi sunt liberi or Only the educated are free is what public school children […]

Browsing through the archives of Archaeology on this very wet Greek day, I pause to read a piece called “Artful Surgery” by one Anagnostis P. Agelarakis. The subtitle states: “Greek archaeologists discover evidence of a skilled surgeon who practiced centuries before Hippocrates.”
The remains of a woman excavated by Eudokia Skarlatidou in the Clazomenean colony […]