My review of Harry Potter and the Classical World by Richard A. Spencer is now online at the Classics for All online reading room. As you can tell from the review, I enjoyed this book great deal! It goes into an incredible amount of detail about the Classical allusions in the Harry Potter series - perhaps... Continue Reading →
Arrival – Linguists save the earth
Language is a problem for sci-fi. In any story involving contact with alien peoples or human civilisations from the distant future, there has to be a mechanism for understanding what everyone else is talking about, or most plots will never get off the ground. In Star Trek, you have the linguist Uhura, who has already presumably put... Continue Reading →
Nurses and “milk-buddies” in Roman epitaphs
One of my favourite things about the Roman death course I'm teaching this year is that every week teaches me something I never knew before. A few weeks ago, while I was translating some epitaphs to use in a lecture, a particular word caught my eye. The inscription ran: Rottio hic sit[us es]t iuve/nili robore... Continue Reading →
How I plan
I didn't mean to make this a week of "How-To" blog posts, but somehow it has become one! Soon after I published my post "How I Write a Lecture", Ellie Mackin posted my contribution to her "How I Plan" series of interviews. If you want to know how I plan my research, you can read... Continue Reading →
How I write a lecture
This term has involved a lot of lecture writing for me. Planning, writing and teaching two brand-new courses at the same time has been brilliant fun so far, but also lots of work. Talking to colleagues, I've realised that not all of us take the same approach to writing new courses - and talking to... Continue Reading →