Neville Morley's Blog, page 2

Twelve Days in the Year: 27th August 2025

Wake up with a painful throat. Oh dear, here we go again. Air conditioning in this hotel? People in the train yesterday? People in the audience on Monday? A. had mentioned on Monday evening, as she reminds me, that my glands looked as if they might be up, which would then suggest that this started earlier and I may have infected a portion of the Tristan und Isolde audience. To be fair, I felt perfectly fine until this morning. Come to think of it, Andreas Schager seemed a little under the weather in Act One, and the capacity of a world-leading Heldentenor to project germs around an auditorium is surely unrivalled.

To compound things, this being a German hotel room there is no capacity to make a cup of tea. We discuss the need to investigate travel kettles for future trips. Read through the papers, do the regular Wordle and sudoku puzzles, shower. Meet son in lobby, walk over to the station to get some breakfast before our train. We head off in different directions, then reconvene at Kamps where I’ve got a coffee and Rosinenschnecke (alas, the Käsekuchen they had on Sunday morning on our trip out seems to be a weekend-only thing) to legitimise our occupation of one of their tables. Brief stop at an Apotheke for paracetamol and throat sweets, then up to the platform.

Unlike yesterday, when we found ourselves with an extra hour and a half in Nürnberg, the train is on time. We head towards dark clouds – some of them figurative. It was certainly a mistake to look at the UK news this morning, as competitive racist authoritarian gets ratcheted up ever further: Farage’s fascists promise to send Afghan children back to the Taliban, various people too extreme for that party call for mass deportation of non-whites, and Starmer takes their very real and not at all racist concerns very seriously and promises to develop more practical approaches to trampling on human rights. Utterly infuriating, loathsome people. I suppose this just makes me the sort of liberal elite who is betraying Real British People. Redraft ideas for relevant chapter of my book on how Thucydides would have been unsurprised by all this crap – which raises a question of whether we might see this as a delayed response to the Plague, loss of concern with honour, chronic short-termism and so forth.

Switch to reading jazz magazine for a bit and listening to some new Nordic jazz/folk/electronica crossover: Benedicte Maurseth on Hardanger fiddle with piano and bass, a concept album on reindeer life cycles – certainly a lot more interesting than the duo concert of Hardanger fiddle and organ we saw a year or so ago back, which was just doing traditional songs. Start to worry that this sort of music might be co-opted into a European identity movement, implying a kind of Blut und Boden worldview (with reindeer), but it seems sufficiently abstract and atonal that the fash are unlikely to enjoy it. Ditto, in a very different manner, the Tomeka Reid Quartet, whom I listen to next. Have another throat sweet.

I’ve been tagged into a Facebook conversation about gleaning and whether there’s any classical evidence for it. Always nice when someone thinks I might have something useful to contribute, even if in this case it’s basically negative that I can’t think of any sources – Cato’s stinginess looks to preclude any such custom, but I don’t recall any explicit rejection of it. There was no duty of helping the poor per se – but what about one’s obligation to neighbours or demesmen? One turns as ever to Theophrastus’ Characters to see if there’s any sign of him mocking the sort of man who wouldn’t let his poor neighbour scavenge what’s left over after harvest.

We arrive at Brussels on time, so have three hours to kill – quirk of Eurostar scheduling is that you’re either bored for ages or rushing from platform to platform in a panicked manner as the changeover time is uncomfortably short. Buy a couple of bottles of Belgian beer from the supermarket, then expensive coffee (for me) and weird tea (for A. and the son; it looks like the terrible overly milky latte of teas), then outside to find a bistro for lunch: acceptable if bloody expensive carbonnade de boeuf. Back in the station for waffles – made with dough, as is the Belgian norm but this year for the first time I’ve noticed seems to have spreads widely across Germany, including to our Bayreuth hotel. Eurostar check-in and security – at least there’s much more room here and it’s so much calmer than London. Buy a fancier bottle of beer (a Trappist Quadrupel!) as here they have the special editions (there used to be some in a corner of the specialist gourmet shop in the main station shopping area, from which I once obtained a bottle of beer that’s supposed only to be sold to locals at the monastery gate – arguably not really worth the money but it’s about the experience – but now that is entirely chocolates and waffles).

Train is on time once again. Having previously exhausted/been exhausted by the news headlines, I avoid the temptation to doomscroll by… continuing with volume 8 of Volker Kutscher’s Rath Krimis, which has now hit 1936 and the Berlin Olympics. Remarkable to think that he began this series back in 2007, when Berlin 1920s-1930s was an interesting setting for a historical crime novel rather than an ever more pressing parallel for our times. We have reached the point where even the somewhat oblivious hero is conscious that things aren’t great, without having yet become completely inured to torture and corruption, which I guess matches the sense that we are no longer anticipating what will happen (as was the case for the volumes set in the early 1930s) but feeling ourselves right in the middle of it with no obvious prospect of escape or relief. Rath’s attempts at avoiding the Hitlergrüss without making this dangerously obvious are an especially nice symptom of gradual moral compromise – at some point he’s either going to go all-in for fear of the consequences, or get into real trouble. I wonder vaguely whether I should save the book for next year’s World Cup, which will probably involve similar propaganda and weasely compromises.

Listening to more Mary Halvorsen – try as I might, and much as I love her records with Tomeka Reid and Thumbscrew, I struggle to get into her critically-lauded albums with her own group – and then an impressive but slightly too frenetic live album by Joe Henderson and McCoy Tyner. Feeling somewhat grotty but less than the man two rows behind who sounds like he has TB – his wife/partner actually moved to sit somewhere else, not returning until just before we arrived in London. Son had taken advantage of free seats to move away from our table in order to escape maternal interrogation for a bit; we were joined instead after Lille by a man with a baby, as his wife was looking after slightly older child – baby fast asleep all the way.

We arrive at St Pancras on time – which means that we have hours to kill after the straightforward tube journey via Oxford Circus down to Waterloo. Changing the tickets to get an earlier train would, I establish, cost more than treble the original price so not an option. We find a cafe for tea (A), chai latte (son) and apple juice (I feel as if I’ve had too much caffeine). At least it’s relatively quiet and has seats. Up to M&S to buy snacks for the evening; hauling suitcases up the stairs as A. has managed to upset the lift, pushing the ‘up’ button repeatedly until the thing seems to be incapable of doing anything other than opening and closing its doors repeatedly, plaintively insisting that it is going down.

Train leaves on time, which is a relief, as I’m feeling rubbish again, counting down the time until I can have some more paracetamol. Fairly straightforward journey; we walk back to where the car is parked, drive son down to the Travellodge where he’s staying for the night, and then home. We do the basic unpacking, then I take more painkillers and go to bed while A. is still winding down.

Rats In A Sack

On the one hand, what’s happening in the University of Chicago – the (supposedly temporary) suspension of recruitment to PhD programmes in Classics as well as other disciplines that require serious language learning – is really pretty trivial compared with the closure of programmes and departments and academic redundancies in universities like Cardiff and Macquarie. On the other hand, this is an American private research university we’re talking about, with an endowment of billions; if the subject is under threat here, what hope does it have in poorer institutions everywhere else, subject to the whims, self-interest and narrow, short-termist perspectives of state authorities as well as the whims, self-interest and narrow, short-termist perspectives of university leadership?

Men: maybe it’s only if you have that sort of silly money that you can pursue the sorts of reckless strategies depicted by Clifford Ando (e.g. https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-crisis-of-the-university-started-long-before-trump/) and dig yourself into quite such a huge hole. De: have you looked at the strategies of other universities lately? And the fact that Chicago shouldn’t be in such a crisis doesn’t detract from the point that they – a university that mentions Thucydides in one of their sporting songs, for goodness’ sake – have decided to respond to said crisis by kicking the humanities, which is an all too familiar phenomenon across the world.

Perhaps because this seems like A Significant Development but one in which no established academic is currently threatened with losing their job, people have been less constrained in their commentary than one might expect, at least on the discipline email list and in social media exchanges. In fact, the whole thing has been a bit of a Rorschach blot for disciplinary reflections. Naming no names, not to cast shade or subtweet but because I think it’s the contents of the discussion that are interesting…

We have had the argument that this is the consequence of undermining Classics by highlighting its racist and sexist traditions and tendencies and by trying to make it ‘woke’ instead of upholding its core mission – and even the rhetorical question that surely this is the outcome that such critics want, burning down the discipline? We have had the contrary argument, that this is the consequence of Classics failing to move with the times and demonstrate its continued relevance. We have actually had less debate about the centrality or otherwise of language learning to Classics than I was expecting, given that this is a perennial bee in the Classicists’ email list bonnet – but the question has been raised of whether this is the future that Walter Scheidel wants, dismantling language-focused Classics to protect Ancient History.

The obvious point is that this isn’t actually specifically about Classics – we tend to focus on that aspect partly because of disciplinary self-interest and partly because Classics benefits from Clifford’s articulate, well-researched updates and analysis. Rather, this is partly about attitudes to non-English languages – are they really so essential in the age of AI? the Chicago plan wonders, in setting out the issues to be explored during the recruitment pause – in the context of a Dean being told to make savings and looking around for something to cut. (We can pass rapidly over the suggestion that we ought to be more sympathetic to the dilemma faced by university managers, made by someone who’s gone into management…).

A striking aspect of these sorts of cost-cutting exercises is the dependence on ‘divide and rule’, at multiple levels. They’re predicated on the separation of academics and university management, so that the process is not collective deliberation about strategy and response – which probably wouldn’t have created the problem in the first place – but ‘consultation’ (I can hear the hollow laughs from Cardiff, Macquarie and elsewhere from here) about the implementation of pre-determined cost-cutting measures and reorganisation. They also rely on setting disciplines against one another – which one can make a strategic case for reducing its exposure by pushing onto another department – and colleague against colleague, as the question is raised of who gets to keep their job, who has attractive options for bailing out and who has no choice but to await the results of an opaque, possibly arbitrary process.

One might imagine that it was the need to undermine any possibility of solidarity that led the Dean of Arts in Chicago to reject a recommendation that either all disciplines should pause PhD recruitment or none of them; in the former case, the ‘pause’ would then be genuine – you’re not going to stop ALL PhD study in ALL humanities disciplines indefinitely – rather than creating a situation where a Dean would be able to tell a number of smaller/weaker disciplines, two years down the line, that regrettably their ‘pause’ needs to be extended, while the rest have carried on as normal. It’s heartening that almost all humanities departments in Chicago have since voted to pause PhD recruitment voluntarily, to show solidarity with their colleagues. One wonders what justification the philosophers have come up with for defecting from this strategy and prioritising their own short-term interests – genuine principled defence of pure self-interest, or unexamined assumption that they’re never going to have to look for solidarity in future?

For some reason, a scene from the second episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes to mind: three teenagers, desperately trying to escape a maze of tunnels, being pursued by vampires, reach a dead end. “We can’t fight our way back through those things,” says one. “What do we do?” “I got an idea,” says another, suddenly sprouting fangs. “You can die.” The desperate attempts at making our subjects relevant and attractive, embracing employability and skills-based learning, working around resource shortages and increased workloads, devoting time to writing funding applications with little hope of success, developing Impact and public engagement, jumping through all the hoops we’re presented with – and then they show their true faces as soulless monsters who just want to drain our life force.

I’m thinking of university leadership and government here, rather than philosophers, but you never know – vampires can look just like ordinary people.

Plastic People

It is of course distressing to realise that demand for my opinions on Thucydides is limited… Just over a fortnight ago I embarked on one of those “One like, one X” social media things on Bluesky, and was initially quite overwhelmed – just as I thought I was starting to catch up with the number of likes, it got reposted by someone else and the counter ticked further upwards. Obviously I have vast numbers of opinions on everything, especially if there is no call for them to be substantiated, but it’s tricky to pull them out of the ether on demand without any sort of prompt or structure. The obvious solution, I realised about 150 opinions in, was to give myself some structure by working through key episodes in Thucydides’ work in order. This in turn created a new problem of trying to balance the rate of opinion-having with the slowing rate of likes as people moved on to the next thing – which I mostly didn’t bother trying to do (if I have an opinion about the mutilation of the herms as analogous to modern-day statue obsessions, I’m not not going to post it…), with the inevitable result that I didn’t get far into Book 6 before the whole thing ran out of steam – I think I may still be in credit for a couple of opinions that I posted in anticipation…

I don’t know what, if anything, this says about Bluesky as a social media platform – other than that, even if it doesn’t compare to the great days of When Twitter Was Good, it’s a lot better than (1) Current Ex-Twitter and (2) nothing. It is now sufficiently mature as a platform that the Thucydides misquotes have started to turn up (as I’ve noted here before, my random-but-serviceable approach to having a vague idea of the state of the Internet is to search for ‘Thucydides’ on different platforms). It’s still rare enough on Bluesky that I keep forgetting to search for weeks on end – and that I haven’t been motivated to set up a new iteration of The Thucydides Bot to correct the misattributions. Nothing new or exciting as yet – a couple of “scholars and warriors” quotes from people who didn’t seem to mind being corrected, and one instance of the “justice will not come to Athens” one. Perhaps I need to add to every correction “by the way, please like my thread so I can get to the end of the book”.

Over on Ex-Twitter, meanwhile, there are at least occasionally new misquotes and dubious paraphrases (did Thucydides state that not one person died of dehydration prior to 400 BC? Oddly enough, no), and entertaining rabbit-holes. It was news to me that C.G. Jung had a quote above the door of his house “Vocatus Atque Non Vocatus Deus Aderit” (“Called or not called, God will be present”) that can plausibly linked to Thucydides, specifically the promise of Apollo in his response to the Spartans about whether they should go to war with Athens (1.118.3). What was bizarre was that the account that had made this connection was absolutely insistent that Jung must have taken the line directly from Thucydides, despite (a) Jung saying in a letter that he took it from Erasmus’ collection of adages, (b) the line appearing in that exact form in Erasmus, presented as a Delphic oracle, and (c) it being in Latin. The gentleman got remarkably cross at the suggestion that Erasmus had surely taken the line from Thucydides, on the grounds that Thucydides’ version was more subtle, which subtlety was also discernible in Jung’s use of… exactly the same words as found in Erasmus’ text. Oh, well.

An increasing number of tweets mentioning Thucydides are emanating from the so-called Grok GenAI thing. These are pretty well invariably bland, reflecting the familiar rendering down of common opinions into sludge. One person did invoke Grok to try to defend the attribution of the “scholars and warriors” quote to Thucydides, which initially affirmed it, and then completely reversed its position when the Thucydides Bot offered contrary information; it remains to be seen whether this will stick next time it’s asked.

And the influence of GenAI seemed fairly clear when another account (parading a whole string of qualifications from assorted universities including Cambridge and Harvard) first attributed the “scholars and warriors” quote to Book 1, then responded to the Bot’s correction by stating that William F. Butler had in fact paraphrased a passage from Book 5, quoting the Greek. Greek which does not actually appear in Thucydides, which shows no connection at all ro the “scholars and warriors” idea, and which at first glance makes little sense.

Butler’s excerpt (1889) is a paraphrase of

“οι Λακεδαιμόνιοι μεν άνδρες ανθ’απάντων ορμήν υμνείων στρατιής, εκάστω θαρρούντι πρότρεπον μνημονεύσαι απεδείκνυτο γαρ μακράν μόχθον εύψυχον σώσαι κρείτον ήν παρ”αυτόν λόγω λόγω όντι ταχίστω”.

Thucydides , History Book V ,

Butler’s excerpt (1889) is a paraphrase of “the Lacedaemonians, however, were against every rush of the army’s hymns, each one daring and urging, remembering that it had been proved that he had endured a long toil, and that he had saved the judge by reason of his own words.” Thucydides , History Book V ,

Debase the beef… canoe. Why do I get the feeling that’s not right?

Meanwhile, I’ve come across a new tribe of weird, apparently bot accounts tweeting gibberish. Gibberish that occasionally mentions the magic word: “substantuated subsult phlebalgia astromancer thermoradiotherapy policemanish nonfusibility geopolitist tropologize thucydides”, for example. Sometimes, these posts read like rejected drafts of new consultant-generated university brand identities – “wauner censer propounder tidier unvaliantly” – or a sub-Harry Potter spellbook: “unwavered moneran submergences uninterestingly schistus contagium”. Mostly they’re unintelligible, or at any rate written in something that isn’t a recognisable language:

o48Nu

‎▬كؤبؤن▬كود▬خصم▬نون▬

‎⎐ٺوٺ⎐

‎⊵BFF4⊴

Uh huh. Cipher? AIs plotting to turn the world into paperclips? Alien invasion codes? What is the point of a message that no one can read? Logically, this must make sense to someone…

Finally in this roundup of random observations, does anyone know anything about WordPress suddenly changing how it counts blog statistics? The stated number of visitors here this month has plummeted overnight, from over 400 to just over 50 – and what’s weird is that if you add up the daily figures over the last two weeks you get the former total, whereas the weekly figures produce the latter. Someone has altered something, but not consistently. It’s not really a problem – one of my continuing resolutions is not to get hung up on the endorphin hit of counting how many people have visited and whether I can match previous totals – but I had been thinking of putting out a call for more people to ‘like’ my Bluesky thread so that I can have Opinions on Book 8, but if all my readers are imaginary…

American Idiot

“Generative AI tools offer significant opportunities to improve teaching and student learning.” Uh huh. The key question about the new American Historical Association guiding principles on the use of Generative AI in history education is whether they have signed up to the idea that this is the inevitable, irresistible Future in a spirit of fanatical enthusiasm or despairing resignation.

There’s a powerful sense that this is a perfect example of the old joke about the camel being the product of a committee trying to design a horse. Using GenAI. Different sections have evidently been written by different people and then stuck together with sellotape. The part about the limitations of GenAI, for example, is clear and eminently sensible; to quote the headlines, AI produces texts, images, audio, and video, not truths; For all its capacities, generative AI regularly hallucinates content, references, sources, and quotations; AI introduces a false sense of certainty where uncertainty exists. And then somehow, via a discussion of AI literacy that does the “resistance is futile so let’s embrace its alleged potential” routine, we get boilerplate advice on the need for concrete and transparent rules and guidance, with the table above offered as an example.(1)

“Generative AI cannot replace historical methodology”. Fair enough; I’m totally on board with the idea that critical historical skills are not just not replicable by the fancy text generator – at best, you get a glib simulacrum – but will be increasingly essential as the glib simulacra take over the world of knowledge. So let’s, I dunno, undermine the teaching of critical historical skills by making it okay for students to rely on AI summaries and ideas plucked from a soup of rendered-down plagiarism? No, you’re not going to find anything in the AHA guidance about copyright or other ethical issues, let alone about environmental impacts. That would be much too negative.

(1) Maybe not exactly the same table, but this is what I got from GenAI when I prompted it.

Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

Ten years or so ago, I had a business idea. This is not something that often happens – precisely twice in my life, in fact, as my entrepreneurial (aka opportunistic) approach to research ideas doesn’t translate into any sort of comfort with the world of enterprise and profit. However, it seemed a good enough idea, not least as it was something for which I would have been prepared to pay decent money if it existed, so that despite some obvious technical issues (look, I have the brilliant idea; it’s someone else’s job to make it work. See, I’m a real entrepreneur) I actually sent it in to a university entrepreneurship competition that happened to be running. And got absolutely nowhere, of course.

The idea was for what could be called a digital legacy service, or (probably less marketable) a digital will. At the time I was spending quite a lot of time in various online communities, mostly under a well-establshed pseudonym. Some of these groups were sufficiently developed and sociable that members met up occasionally in real life, and certainly I counted (and in some cases count) people in them as real friends. A couple of members died, with the news only gradually spreading because someone else happened to be connected to them in meatspace – and so I came to think that it would be a shame if, on my own death, I simply vanished out of the lives of these friends, as of course my wife and executors would have no idea about this side of my social life. So, the plan was for a digital equivalent of a sealed ‘not to be opened before my demise’ envelope containing logins and passwords for different sites, instructions on what messages to post and on how to shut down the accounts afterwards. Simple – so long as you don’t think too hard about how to manage the verification of death to avoid mistakes or hoaxes – but it’s still something that I’d like to have, if only as a kind of add-on to password management programmes.

Now, I’m not going to claim that this was the greatest idea ever; I don’t know how much demand there would be (especially as people notoriously dislike contemplating death), or whether the running costs would make it completely uneconomical – cheaper just to leave written instructions and some money in my will to pay someone to do it? But a story this week about the sale of the route-finding app Komoot to private equity by its “we will never sell out to private equity” founders (see https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/) made me think that the problem is far bigger – that my conception of business is stuck in the nineteenth century.

Neville’s grasp of business, perhaps fuelled by studying pre-modern economies: create product or develop service, sell this to people who need/want it at price above cost, make money and use some of this to expand/develop/innovate. Modern business: create product or develop service, sell this to people at far below cost price or give it away to build customer base and destroy any competition, screw over users and suppliers because they don’t have anywhere else to go, and add AI regardless of whether anyone wants it. Where in a digital legacy service is the potential for growth, when it’s just a one-off thing? How am I going to extract user information to sell when it’s supposed to be all about privacy? I suppose there is some scope for selling advertising for funeral plans and end-of-life care…

So, back to the drawing-board – for my Cat Christmas Climbing Tree, an extremely stable and claw-proof decorative cat tower complete with flashing lights and unbreakable baubles for people who can’t have a proper Christmas tree because their cats will pull it over and destroy everything. Well, I want one.

Twelve Days in the Year: 27th July 2025

Woke from a deep sleep, albeit with very peculiar dreams involving a complicated journey across a city that I can’t place but seems very familiar. It’s the first really good sleep I’ve had for at least a week; back in my own bed, with my own pillow rather than an uncomfortable combination of a pillow without any substance and a too-hard sofa cushion. A., however, is suffering horribly and audibly, from the infection she picked up last week – which looks more and more like COVID – to which has been added the impact of a long day of travelling yesterday, and an eye infection. I make tea and read the papers while she goes back to sleep. Eventually I get bored and go downstairs for another cup of tea and a bowl of muesli. I start quietly unpacking the suitcases and sorting washing; made slightly trickier by the fact that the dining room table is covered with red onions drying off. For once this is not my doing, and I hope to get some more leeway next time I attempt to take over a large area of the house with stuff that needs to dry off.

A. does not read my blog, but I know that a friend does – hi, Tracy! – and passes things on. So I probably shouldn’t note that she’s being rather silly about her sickness, getting up to make a cup of tea rather simply asking me to get it for her, and insisting on doing the washing. Presumably this is to preserve the mystique that operating the washing machine is a task beyond the capability of any husband… She does submit to me hanging the clothes out on the line, and then goes back to bed again. I go into town to buy fruit and a few other things, then have a light lunch – my sense of time, especially mealtimes, is out of kilter just from being an hour behind after when my body thinks it is after four weeks in Poland and Germany.

The main task for the afternoon, especially since the rain is holding off, is making a start on mowing the lawn – heavily overgrown after a fortnight’s neglect and the combination of heat and rain – as well as inspecting the vegetable beds and greenhouse. Pleased to see that I’ve got at least a couple of winter squash and one pumpkin coming along, and the chillis and aubergines are doing well, but the fennel has run to seed. The grass is so thick that the mower batteries lose their charge at least twice as fast as normal, so I can’t actually finish the whole thing. Cut the edges around some of the raised beds, dig potatoes and cut a head of calabrese for supper. Suddenly it starts to rain, and I have to rush to get the washing inside.

The next hour and a half involves juggling the cooking of supper (a simple meal of meatballs and Swedish-style cream sauce, plus veg), phoning my parents and watching the closing laps of the Tour de France. A. comes down for a small plateful of food and we watch Tagesschau – Trump visit to UK, horrors of Gaza, train crash in Baden-Württemberg – then she goes back to bed as there is absolutely nothing on. I put on a cd and continue to try to make some progress in having a sufficient number of ideas about Thucydides, having unwisely done one of those ‘One like, one Thucydides opinion’ things on social media, and realised belatedly that some of the things I wrote when only twenty or so people had ‘liked’ the comment were much too sweeping and could have furnished three or four individual opinions for the purposes of hitting the target of 150+ that I now face. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Headed up to bed around nine, having completely forgotten that there was a football final on. Read some more Stefan Zweig – his collection of vignettes of key moments in human history, an entertainingly idiosyncratic selection that so far has included the fall of Constantinople, the writing of the Marseillaise and G.F. Handel’s stroke that led to the miracle of him writing The Messiah – and turn the light out when I suddenly realise that it’s half past ten. It’s only tomorrow at half past six that I realise that I’ve forgotten to adjust the alarm clock to UK time.

Damaged Goods

He looked at the new homepage of the University of Warwick, and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that university senior management teams are no longer even remotely human.

It’s not just the excessive use of mauve, or the aversion to definite pronouns, or the vacuous slogan. It’s not even the fact that the very first link on the page is ‘Learn more about our Brand’, which then explains that “Our strategic brand framework is built on our Brand Purpose, Brand Values & Behaviours and Marketing Themes, all of which collectively shape our Brand Proposition” – but they have now cut off access to the detailed guidelines on “how to employ the Voice of Beyond – “Do not use Beyond conventionally. It should always be used as a subject noun or abstract noun”, so that the link just takes you to a log-in page.

No, the point where you realise that this is an art project, drawing on a never-filmed script for the second Absolutely Fabulous film, is the interview with Warwick’s Chief Communications Officer and Visionaire in Vogue Singapore.

Seeing a university as a brand unlocks coherence and confidence. A brand is about more than design, it’s about identity and consistency. When you align your values, your story and your impact, you become more than a place, you become a movement. At Warwick, brand isn’t just a communications tool, it’s a strategic asset. It helps us attract brilliant minds, forge global partnerships and create a distinctive space in a competitive world.

https://vogue.sg/university-of-warwick-ajay-teli/?

This is all very very funny, but also extremely dark. An entire senior management team signed all this stuff off without seeing any problem with it. More than likely, other senior management teams up and down the country are gnashing their teeth that they didn’t think of it first, and firing their current brand consultants in order to throw money at different ones. You don’t just have a brand; your brand is talking about your brand and the process behind it. Sorry: you don’t just have Brand; Brand is talking Brand and Brand Process.

An alternative word comes to mind: reputation. That would serve the same purpose of attracting leading researchers and students, and helping to build international networks. But it’s something that rests on what you’ve already done and what you’re currently doing, on your existing staff and their work. It can’t be magicked into existence by spending a few million on consultants and reducing your use of definite nouns; it’s built, not bought.

And it’s difficult not to see this branding exercise – not limited to Warwick, even if they’re providing the perfect case study – as a desperate admission that actually reputation isn’t going to cut it, that British universities need glossy marketing campaigns to sell a dubious product or simply to keep the show on the road by projecting an image of dynamism and futurity. As with so much else at the moment, the relentless boosting of GenAI sets the tone. Some SMTs probably genuinely believe in this stuff, others adopt it because everyone else is doing it and they have constant anxiety that they aren’t proper CEOs.

Part of the logic of branding is that you associate yourself with Thing. Thing is your identity, your mission, your story; Thing creates coherence – and anything UnThing undermines the whole enterprise. The problem with universities is that they do too many different things; they’re about multiple subjects and disciplines, many different research projects, huge numbers of ideas and methods and principles and ways of doing intellectual work. How do you pull all this together into a single identity? You call yourself the University of X.

What if that’s not dynamic and forward-looking enough for an ambitious President or Vice-Chancellor? Then you make yourself Thing, and expect everyone in the university to submit to Thing (or at least pretend not to snigger), and then start cutting areas that are insufficiently Thing…

It’s Getting Hot In Here

Well, I hope that the Roman environmental historians are all set for a bit of public engagement and explanation, because Reform UK, Durham Sturmbannabteilung, has decided to weaponise a bit of ancient history in its campaign against climate action.

During a sometimes fractious and bad-tempered debate on Wednesday, the Reform council leader, Andrew Husband, said the authority was now driven by data and common sense.

“During the Roman-occupied era not far away from County Durham, around 45AD, there is evidence of Roman vineyards along Hadrian’s Wall. This is because the Roman period in Britain is known for having a relatively warm climate which would have been conducive to growing grapes. Mind, how the climate has changed,” he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/16/reform-led-durham-county-council-scraps-climate-emergency-declaration

How to put this? Some parts of that statement are not completely untrue. Granted, the Roman conquest of Britain started only in 43, and it wasn’t until the early 70s that any army ventured north of York; so maybe this wasn’t one of the things the Romans ‘did’ for us, or maybe he’s shaky on dates. While there is substantial evidence for vine-growing in some regions of England, the Nene Valley in Northamptonshire for example, I’m not aware of any from as far north as Hadrian’s Wall, but I may simply be out of touch with current research.

What is correct is that the idea of a ‘Roman Warm Period’ starting c.250 BCE (the estimated end date depends very much on what evidence is being considered) is quite widely accepted by environmental historians and archaeologists, on the basis of plants (e.g. vines, dates) fruiting in regions where (until recently) they have not thrived in the modern period, and proxy data from pollen analysis, tree rings, sediment analysis and the like. I’m now actually rather surprised that I haven’t come across the Roman Warm Period being put forward, along with phenomena like the Little Ace Age of the early modern period, as an argument that climate change is completely natural and normal, has always happened, probably something to do with sunspots, and so the whining of muesli-eating eco-warriors can safely be ignored.*

But this is an argument at the level of “It was unseasonably cold and wet in May; global warming is a myth! Time to reopen the coal mines!” Two things can be true: the climate may have changed naturally in the past and be changing now due to human activity. Further, and most crucially, the balance of evidence indicates that the Roman Warm Period was a regional, not a global, phenomenon, whereas what is terrifying about the last hundred or so years is that average global temperatures keep on steadily rising – with local and regional variations, of course, but the overall trend is relentlessly upwards. This thing is not at all like that thing, British wine production notwithstanding.

A little learning is a dangerous thing? Or deliberate peddling of half-truths to promote a destructive far-right agenda? If the scientific data don’t actually support your ‘common sense’, find some other data that apparently do….

* This is probably why those Roman soldiers from North Africa felt so comfortable here. No, hold on, that was the sort of BBC virtue-signalling that noble culture warriors think is destroying our national history…

Every Loser Wins

The grand tour continues. Hello Warszawa! Sorry, Wrocław! Is it time for Thucydides on atheism, or the lessons of history, or powerlessness, or something else entirely?

Partly because I talk more happily from notes than reading a prepared text – not least because non-anglophones apparently enjoy listening to my old-fashioned BBC English regardless of whether I’ve completely lost the thread – I tend to give a lot of different papers, even if they’re hastily improvised variations on a smaller set of themes (my academic model is of course the second great Miles Davis Quintet), rather than the same properly-prepared one multiple times. This does mean that plenty of them never get published, or even looked at again until, when preparing another talk, I vaguely recall using a particular passage in a set of PowerPoint slides and so go hunting for it.

In the case of the paper on the reception of Thucydides’ ‘atheism’ that I gave at a conference in Bochum last week, I am fairly confident that they are planning a conference volume and so I can expect to have to write that up at some point. In the case of today’s paper, it seems vanishingly unlikely that it will ever appear in print – not least because I did lose the thread somewhere in the middle, and just had to keep talking in the hope of stumbling across it again. And so, since it did actually contain one original idea, I thought I should note it here for posterity…

Any fan of Star Trek will probably be familiar with the Kobayashi Maru exercise. This is a simulation, in which a Star Fleet Academy cadet takes command of a ship and has to decide whether to try to rescue a civilian vessel, the Kobayashi Maru, that is damaged and stranded in the neutral zone between Federation and Klingon space; if the cadet proceeds to launch a rescue mission, their ship is suddenly surrounded and fired upon by three Warbirds, with no hope of escape – surrender or abandoning ship are the only options. The complaint of those who take the test is that it’s a cheat; there is no way to win. The response is that this is the point: it is a test of how a cadet responds to such a hopeless scenario, to the fear of death and defeat, and how they lead their crew in this situation.

Thesis: Thucydides invented the Kobayashi Maru exercise. That is to say: his work repeatedly places the reader in no-win situations (I follow Hobbes in echoing Plutarch that T.’s skill as an author is to make his readers vicariously experience the events described, rather than observing them from a safe distance, as Hegel describe contemplation of history as being like observing a distant shipwreck from the safety of the shore). The fate of the Plataeans (“What have you done to aid the Spartans in this war?”). The plague (sheer chance as to whether people survive, and those who try to maintain traditional virtue are more likely to die). The Corcyrean stasis (ditto). The Melians (discounting the very remote chance that the Spartans might actually turn up to help for a change). And with many of the set-piece debates, the agony is that we hear specious and risky arguments but are powerless to object to their premises, to influence the course of the discussion or prevent foolish decisions being made.

Taking at face value T.’s claim that he hopes his work will be found useful or advantageous, what is it that he might intend us to take from such episodes? One might draw the sorts of lessons and understanding that modern readers have often claimed to identify in his text: the failures of democratic deliberation (does that help, or just lead us towards a Hobbesian suspicion of democracy?), the dynamics of factionalism and polarisation (but is the lesson then simply to keep a suitcase packed for the first signs of trouble, or to commit heartily to one faction as it’s the reasonable moderates who get attacked from both sides), the rhetoric of the powerful (but we kinda already know that)?

Perhaps the point is the experience itself: finding oneself in a position of inferiority, mortal threat and hopelessness, as a test of one’s character and emotional resilience. How would one respond? How should one? It is important that we imagine ourselves as the Plataeans, not just the Spartans; as the Melians, not just the Athenians [gestures violently towards traditional Realists]. It’s not about precepts or normative principles, but about how it feels to be helpless. The captain cannot cheat death.

In both 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and the 2009 Star Trek retcon/alternate timeline, cadet James T. Kirk reprogrammed the simulation so that he could win, on the grounds that he didn’t believe in no-win scenarios. In the former, he was praised for his ingenuity and determination; in the latter, he’s summoned before a disciplinary committee for cheating, and told that he has entirely missed the point of the test. Mr Spock was the Thucydidean…

I Will Follow

The Panopticon is here, people! At any rate for our youngest cat, the indefatigable Hector. I’m currently on a sort of academic road trip – if it’s Tuesday, it must be Wrocław; what am I supposed to be talking about at this conference..? – and because my wife gets anxious about the cats when I’m not there to extract them from neighbours’ gardens, get them down from trees etc., we have upgraded our cat tracking technology.

The previous system was a beeping thing that gives you a vague sense of direction and distance if it is close enough to pick up a signal from a tag on their collars (assuming batteries in both detector and tag have enough charge, and the tag hasn’t randomly stopped working, and there’s no ‘r’ in the month…). This would certainly have saved us much worry and sleepless nights in the case of former, late lamented cats, who got stuck in a shed for three days (because too nervous to show himself when someone opened the door to check) and stuck in the nearby Methodist chapel’s kitchen annex over Easter weekend, respectively – but its limited range means that I have to do a lot of wandering around the area to try to pick up a signal, never knowing whether absence of evidence really is evidence of absence or just the gizmo playing up again. NOW we have bitten the bullet for proper real-time GPS tracking – just for Hector, as the other two stay closer to home.

This is both reassuring and fascinating. It’s not just that my wife can see where he is, so I’m spared the possibility of tearful phone calls that he’s not come home by twilight which I can’t do anything about from a train somewhere in southern Poland, but that *I* can see where he is, even though I’m on a train somewhere in southern Poland. We can see where he goes, how he patrols the areas that are clearly established as his territory, and how he more rarely ventures a bit further. The app collects and presents all sorts of information – presumably to justify the cost of the subscription – so we can see him putting us to shame by racking up a good couple of miles ever day without fail.

Before we got this thing, we experimented with an Airtag; tl;dr, it relies on Bluetooth so isn’t much use for a cat roaming the local fields with relatively few iPhone users in the vicinity. One thing that struck me with that gadget was the very clear warning that one should NOT use an Airtag to track people without their knowledge, which, like any “Do not eat” label, strongly suggests that people do this all the time. Cats don’t have any such legal protection from surveillance; no evidence whether Hector resents this – he hasn’t attempted to lose the tag or take off the collar. You might observe that the screen-shotted map above has a surprising little excursion over the road to the north; we are pretty confident that he didn’t actually do this, and that it’s a GPS hiccup – but perhaps he’s working out a way to confuse the system and evade his trackers…

This is not a profound post, not least because I’ve slept badly for much of the last week and am feeling very unprofound; just that one big drawback of a lengthy trip is missing the cats, and there are still technological things that feel futuristic and somewhat wonderful, even if it’s all too easy to see the dystopian side. We just want to keep Hector safe and healthy – but the DDR would have made similar claims about its attitude towards its citizens.

Google Maps is wonderfully useful for getting me from train station to hotel in a strange city where my grasp of the language is limited to five or six phrases – but it can show me where I am because The System knows exactly where I am. I ask new apps not to track me when not using them – but the wording suggests that they might do it anyway (“App will not track” would be more reassuring than “Ask app not to track”, as at least they’d be caught out lying if they did it). If I read the newspaper on my phone, it gives me a link to the cricket, so clearly I’ve deactivated that tracker; on the laptop, the cricket vanishes when I’m out of the UK, because clearly it knows I’m abroad – but doesn’t know me well enough to provide the cricket score anyway.

Meanwhile, Hector has just unlocked another exercise level for being in the top 10% of Siamese cats of his age in the south west of England. I need to check his social media account to see if he’s starting to get personalised offers…