Neville Morley's Blog, page 41

TFs Working Overtime

There’s been a lot of discussion on the Twitter this week about an advertised vacancy for a fixed-term teaching position that expects the successful candidate to devise an MA module related to their own research. I’m going to out myself as an Old Person, and possibly bring a shower of condemnation on my head, by confessing that my feelings about this are more mixed than the prevalent judgement that this is obviously and unacceptably exploitative. In my day, when I was applying for such positions, I was far more attracted to positions that offered such freedom rather than defining the job in terms of which pre-existing courses should be taught – and, yes, it’s entirely revealing that I think of this in terms of ‘freedom’.

I am not for a moment suggesting that this is how today’s young scholars ought to be thinking about jobs; rather, it emphasises the difference between then and now, and perhaps explains some of the unexamined assumptions of those devising job descriptions today, which were formed by their experiences then. That is to say, I’m not sure how far such positions are deliberately exploitative, rather than reflecting a certain thoughtlessness, or even the negative consequences of good intentions.

What’s changed in thirty years? One obvious thing is the level of demands on early career scholars to give themselves any hope of a career. I spent the whole of the summer after submitting my PhD (in the fourth year, to touch on another recent debate…) living with my parents and preparing teaching; partly because I had somehow landed a position in Greek History and had to catch up with literature in various areas, and partly just because I could, postponing any thought of further writing or research until after the viva, whereas today’s young scholars have to submit their theses and then get straight on with other potential publications. Having to devise entirely new courses is an additional demand on time and energy that are already depleted and over-committed – let alone having to devise them in advance of actually knowing that you’ve got the job, or even just to get a shot at being shortlisted. At the very least, the idea of demanding a course design as part of the initial application process is simply insane.

But there is another thing that’s changed: the amount of material available for a pre-existing course, in terms of structure, reading lists, compilations of sources, PowerPoint slides etc., such that it is today possible to take over a course with a much smaller amount of preparation than it once was. Thirty years ago, taking over an existing course meant having to accept a theme and structure which wouldn’t necessarily be how you’d want to do it (and this can be really quite difficult, as I’ve found over the last two years in teaching a course in Exeter devised by one of my colleagues), but not necessarily a lot more – if I’d got a position with a more specified teaching load, I’d still have had to do the months of preparation, creation of material for students etc., just with much less freedom to organise things to play to my own strengths. Freedom’s just another word for nothing there to use…

Today, for any existing module/unit there is generally a load of stuff on Blackboard and the like that can simply be adapted and adopted by anyone assigned to teach it, rather than having to be created from scratch. So, getting a teaching fellow to create a new course is a task that is not actually necessary for the delivery of their part of the programme (or, not a way of making the TF’s job easier by allowing them to draw on their own expertise and material). It also results in the creation of material that could be reused by the department as well as the teacher; I’m honestly not sure how far this is a deliberate outcome (what’s the value in having a course that’s closely linked to the specific interests and expertise of someone you’re not planning to employ for more than a year?), but given that these fixed-term positions are increasingly exploitative anyway, this adds insult to injury.

Over the last twenty-odd years I have mourned, and regularly cursed, the enormous increase in gratuitous bureaucracy surrounding the creation of new units/modules, such that it can take a year or more to get a new one approved (while facing down a general air of disapproval). I persist in the view that this is driven partly by the science model, when the creation of a new module implies the emergence of an entirely new field of study and so requires lots of careful prepation and scrutiny that simply doesn’t apply to humanities courses – and partly by the usual ‘quality’ dilemma, whereby the only means of demonstrating proper quality assurance is to have elaborate, extensively documented processes for everything.

I’ve mourned this not least because of the sense that the freedom I enjoyed as a new lecturer and even as a temporary teaching fellow to create new courses, make use of my expertise etc. has been denied to younger generations. But it starts to look like a blessing in disguise, that already overburdened young scholars cannot be compelled to do more preparation than they need to (given that they aren’t being paid for it) – and so shouldn’t be asked to. The struggle goes on to ensure that such positions are properly funded and not exploitative (this isn’t new; my first job was a six-month one, neatly covering the teaching period, with pro rata payment for exam marking having to be chiselled out of the university by the department), and this is just one element – but it’s one that I must admit I hadn’t fully thought through until now.

The Ladybird Book of Thucydides

Here is Donald. Here is Vladimir.

Donald is scared. Donald is greedy. Donald wants everyone to admire his big red balloon.

Vladimir has a ruthless, clear-sighted sense of his personal interests.

What do you think is going to happen, children?

Pat the dog is hiding under the duvet.

Here is America. Here is China.

America is an established power. China is a rising power.

Are they going to fight?

Donald is strong.

Donald thinks the strong can do what they want.

Is he going to launch an expedition against Syracuse?

This is Sebastian.

Sebastian doesn’t really know anything about Thucydides either.

Holiday Snaps

In clinching proof that I am incapable of switching off the academic brain even when surrounded by beautiful countryside, unfeasible numbers of storks, fine food and excellent beer, I have been getting cross with an innocuous History of Croatia. The first 80% of the first chapter is more or less okay – the account of the Romans is unnecessarily confused by the fact that the author knows Octavian and Augustus are the same person but clearly isn’t sure why and certainly doesn’t see any need to explain it to the reader – but then we come to the arrival of the Croats. They came with other Slavs. Or not. Their language is Slavic, but other characteristics point to a different origin, according to some theories. They were a distinct group. Or perhaps they weren’t. Maybe they actually came from Iran. But we don’t actually have any evidence. It’s all a mystery.

The problem is the conventional ‘history as a load of facts’ approach, when there aren’t actually any facts – or at least not the ones the author wants. This account would all be so much clearer with just a sentence or two of deeper analysis: *how* do we know what (little) we think we know? “Written records appeared long after the events they claim to describe; they recorded a whole load of different and conflicting stories, which were concerned not with historical accuracy but with asserting claims about identity or territory or rights; perhaps some of them contain elements of truth, but in the absence of other sorts of evidence we can’t tell; the crucial point is that the people who wrote these early accounts didn’t know where the Croats came from either.”

It’s not untrue that we academic historians have a tendency to lapse into the old “actually it’s more complicated than that”. But in this case the complicated, historical answer is surely clearer and more intelligible than a miscellaneous ragbag of stories that amount to nothing without any explanation. It’s the reason why I find it hard to turn down the ‘academic consultant’ gigs I’m occasionally offered; it’s not about spotting egregious errors, it’s about coming up with formulations that convey information without misleading oversimplification – and sometimes that involves talking about why things are complex, or shifting the discussion to historical debates rather than just ‘facts’.

It is of course possible that I’ll get less cross as we move onto the subject of medieval Croatia, about which I know absolutely nothing…

Read ‘Em And Weep

Apparently, pointing out to Trump fans or rabid Brexiteers that they’re being taken for a ride by corrupt, loathsome bastards may make them double down on their commitment to said bastards. Clearly this precautionary principle has been adopted wholesale by Goodreads, to judge from their policy on correcting fake Thucydides quotes; anything that has lots of ‘likes’ from users of the site is not to be deleted, regardless of its proven falsehood. Yes, my occasional mission to give F.B. Jevons and William F. Butler their proper due for ‘Of all manifestations of power…’ and ‘The nation that divides its soldiers from its warriors…’ respectively has a new target. Those two have been sorted out – Jevons gets credit now rather than Thucydides, while somehow the Butler has been deleted as insufficiently worthy, but apparently nothing can be done about ‘peace is an armistice in an endless war’, ‘justice will not come to Athens’ and even, dear gods, ‘a collision at sea can ruin your whole day’.

”We are,” Goodreads tell me, “book review and recommendations site.” Well, yes. So what’s with the quotes?

While we do have quotes on the site, we consider them to be community-owned content and therefore we have strict rules regarding removing.

So, the people of Goodreads have had enough of experts, and resent being talked down to by people who think they know better and want to delete their favourite quotes. I find myself thinking so much more positively of Wikipedia and its editors than I did a few months ago…

Black Box

It’s widely recognised – at least among education professionals – that national debates around are unhelpfully shaped by anecdata, the extrapolation of personal experience into broader principles and the legitimation of such principles through lived experience. It’s the “I was beaten regularly and it made me the man I am today” approach to discipline, the “grammar school allowed me to escape my deprived upbringing so it must be best for everyone” policy, the “I learnt my times table and lots of dates so obviously it’s the lack of those that explains The Problem With Youth Today” school of curriculum reform. It’s a major source, if not the major source, of the nostalgia for the days when university was a minority privilege that pervades discussions such as this morning’s fuss about too many Undeserving People getting Inflated Grades, spoon-fed snowflakes and lax standards, nothing wrong with a Desmond ha ha in my day.

Better, let alone different, always actually means worse. Because of course it can’t be that today’s students actually work harder and more effectively, or that modern teaching methods and approaches are more appropriate and successful. Because even if that doesn’t call our own credentials into question – still more, our sense of what those credentials mean – then it would certainly establish that our experience, and our sense of what an education is, isn’t universally and eternally valid. And on what basis would politicians and their enablers then be able to develop educational policy, without having to listen to those whiny and inconvenient experts?

This isn’t to claim that practitioners and experts are in no way ever affected by our own experiences; but the more students you engage with, the harder it becomes to assume that a one-size-fits-all experience exists (especially if you spend time in different sorts of universities with different sorts of intake). Still more, it puts one’s own experience in a different light to see how things actually work, rather than just accepting the end result as the output of an inscrutable, infallible and certainly irreproachable black box. Now, I should say that, never having been an examiner in the Cambridge system, I still don’t have more than a fuzzy idea of how the hell I ended up with the degree class that put me on track for PhD funding, and quite possibly things have changed substantially since then – but comparing then and now gives me a powerful sense of how todays’s students are being properly helped to realise their potential, and how much I’m driven by a wish to give them a better (or at least less confused) experience than I had.

End of the second year. My current students have a clear sense of where they stand, knowing the grades that will count for a third of their final degree, and so having a good idea of how they’ll need to perform in the final year – which maybe leads some of them to slacken off, or gives a false sense of security, but on the whole I doubt it. More importantly, they’ve been given detailed information about what they need to do to maintain the standard or improve, in different forms of assessment – and the possibility of choosing between final-year courses offering different sorts of assessment, if it’s clear that they’re better at coursework than exams.

I, on the other hand, have had lots of practice in hacking out a more or less plausible argument at short notice on the basis of limited reading, with little sense of whether the essays were any good or not – which doesn’t really matter because they don’t count for anything. Sum total of feedback on second-year performance, after the exams (which also don’t count towards the final degree): “that’s all fine” from my tutor, and the passing comment from the wonderful Rosamond McKitterick, who’d supervised me for early medieval European history, that “you could be capable of getting a first if you applied yourself”. Other than just reading more, and spending less time on other things, I’m not entirely sure what this should involve.

On to the final year. My students have written essays and source analyses, they’ve developed extended research projects, they’ve given presentations in mini conferences, and some have even done exams; and all along they’ve been given guidance on what they’re expected to do, and feedback on how they’ve done – and for one module, the key part of the assessment is how they make use of that feedback for the revised submission. Spoon-feeding? Hardly, unless you think that the only valid learning is via random osmosis, picking up a sense of how to produce a proper academic analysis by reading other people’s, without any explicit guidance – and that doesn’t matter anyway because the only assessments that count are four unseen exams, for some of which you haven’t actually been prepared properly so the questions all seem rather random…

I’m not going to say that I didn’t deserve my degree, just that it certainly involved a considerable amount of luck – some of which went my way, some didn’t, so perhaps we’re even – and possibly (I can’t know, but suspect) the sort of judgement that we don’t use any more, that I seemed on balance like a first-class sort of chap. Some of my students today would probably have done just as well under that system, others not – and the crucial point is that this would not be a reflection of their overall abilities, but of a specific subset of them, and a lot of luck. And both categories would accept this as an objective judgement of their qualities, when that might not be true in either case.

Would I get a first under the current system? Probably (it’s never a certainty, and my somewhat wayward second year would count against me). But – and this is where the counterfactual gets ever more abstract – not on the basis of the sort of work I actually produced back then*, but on the basis of the kind of work I’d have been capable of producing with more guidance and more detailed feedback, with the sort of support and guidance I’d get today. And two further things follow from that. Firstly, whatever the result, I’d have known pretty well why I got it, rather than just being presented with on oracular judgement. Secondly, whatever the result, I’d have been vastly better prepared for research, or indeed for more or less anything else besides hacking out plausible essays and improvising arguments under exam conditions.

I remain entirely unconvinced by the whole system of degree classification – the step change between classes, and the baroque rules for classification, are simply absurd. But I feel pretty confident that, on average, today’s degree results are more meaningful than those of thirty years ago, insofar as the system is transparent (albeit baroque) and judgements are based on more than just “X had a couple of good days”. There are doubtless other influences on changing patterns of grades (yes, I instinctively blanch at the idea of 40% firsts…) – but the fact that we actually attempt to teach students and assess them on their skills as well as their luck and short-term memory is certainly a major factor.

*I can easily imagine the sort of feedback I’d have given myself: “Some interesting and original ideas, and a plausible line of argument, but you need to develop your points in more depth and support them with evidence. You must read more widely, and spend more time planning the structure; clearly written, but referencing is non-existent. 58”

Not From Concentrate

A very minor footnote to current debates about the treatment of migrants on the United States’ southern border… The emotive phrase ‘concentration camps’ has been used a fair amount, and whenever that happens you can guarantee that someone on the Twitter will come up with the “well actually they were invented by the British in South Africa” line – not, I think, with the aim of relativising the Holocaust or playing down the outrage, but perhaps to side-step invocations of Godwin’s Law and emphasise that respective Anglo-Saxon democracies can do this sort of this as well.

This week brought a new variant: well actually it wasn’t the British but the Greeks, see Thucydides’ account of the Athenian prisoners kept in terrible conditions in quarries after the Syracuse disaster (7.87). Hmm. The obvious objection is that, however inhuman their treatment, these were prisoners of war, whereas the hallmark of the modern concentration camp is the internment of civilians. The obvious question is: What function does such a claim serve? In the actual Twitter exchange it comes across less as an attempt to exculpate the British than simply as the provision of yet more historical information. But it still feels like a distraction, a missing of the point, or at least a dissolving of the point into a general ‘humans have always done this to each other’ sigh of despair rather than a focused attack on the choices of a particular state.

Definitely Maybe

A fascinating morning in a rather different sort of exam board to the ones I’ve been used to. Exeter, like I imagine most if not all other UK universities, is busy covering itself against the possibility that student performances were adversely affected by the strike action, and part of the response is a barrage of statistical analysis; rather than looking at individual mark profiles, today was all about considering the patterns of marks at module level, with the aim of identifying anywhere the distribution differs from previous years to a statistically significant degree, so that the possibility of scaling can then be considered – with individual profiles being reviewed once any additional number crunching has taken place.

This all led me to blow my cover as an amateur statistics nerd, as I not only found the whole thing fascinating but was happy to defend it against sceptical colleagues. The objections were interesting, and arguably revealing. Firstly, that this sort of cohort approach completely ignores the individual student experience, and telling a student who strongly feels their studies were disrupted that, no, we’ve done the numbers and they weren’t is not a good look. That’s certainly true in public relations terms, and it is definitely important that, when we come to look at individual (anonymised) profiles, it will be clear if a given student has had a lot of their modules disrupted and if their performance is substantially worse than last year. But it is surely not irrelevant to be able to say that, according to the numbers, performances across a given module were not significantly different from previous years, even if a given student feels that they ought to have been affected; and for me the advantage of this approach is that, if we had found a case where the numbers suggested a problem, any remedy would have benefitted all the affected students rather than just those who complained. There is always a risk of making concessions to those who make a fuss, neglecting those who just accept circumstances and decisions.

The second objection is about the marker, not the student: that it’s invidious to be compared with someone else’s marking practices. But this happens all the time (it’s what moderation and external examining is all about); it’s just that this is on a more solid evidential basis. I found it most interesting to realise that, while I hadn’t thought that one class was as good as last year’s lot, I’d actually marked them very similarly – my impression was clearly based on things other than their performances, or on a limited number of things (fewer really high firsts, perhaps) rather than a dispassionate overview of the whole cohort. I have a sense of myself as a relatively strict marker, because I tend to remember cases where I’m arguing down a colleague – but again the numbers don’t wholly support this impression.

If we were all expected to conform to a single pattern, and marks were automatically modified if they didn’t follow a normal distribution, there would clearly be a problem; there are lots of reasons, from the particular group of students to the group dynamic to changes in assessment, why performance might vary from year to year or module to module. It’s the start of a conversation, or of self-reflection, to be shown how e.g. students at the lower end perform less well in my final-year Thucydides class than in their other modules while those at the upper end do better. Yes, there’s something slightly disturbing about a colleague getting a p-value of 1 in a t-test comparing this year’s marks with last year’s – but we’re not about to start quoting p-values in staff review. We’ll just keep a close eye out for further evidence that he’s actually a replicant.

Is this an all too conventional humanities suspicion of numbers, and still more of what Certain People seek to do with numbers? A resistance to the idea of reducing individual uniqueness – of the student *and* the lecturer – to crude comparisons and cohort analysis? Of the implied loss of autonomy and denigration of authority? The simple fact is that, while I don’t doubt my own judgement in its own terms, I’m quite conscious that I value certain attributes and approaches more than others, and that’s something that does need to be checked; but it’s clear from this data that there are also patterns, and even biases, of which I am not so aware, and those also need to be checked.

You can’t assume that the numbers tell you all you need to know; but what they do tell you – crudely, this is what you actually did, regardless of what you thought you did, and this is how it compares – is not to be ignored.

Going Underground

In Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, academics who fell foul of the regime – merely for expressing ideas that didn’t fit the party line – were censored, silenced, forced out of their positions and even imprisoned. It’s no exaggeration to say that exactly the same thing is happening today, in the very countries which once stood for freedom and liberal values. Totalitarian regimes tolerate no dissent; we see academics once again being denounced simply for discussing inconvenient ideas, forbidden from organising lectures (and hounded by organised mobs if they do so), forced to hold seminars on radical ideas under conditions of the greatest secrecy, barred from publication in mainstream journals, and persecuted on trumped-up charges simply for trying to engage students with political issues.

These colleagues need our help and support – and we have the historical example of brave liberals like Roger Scruton and the Jan Hus Educational Foundation to show us the way. We need to show these beleaguered intellectual heroes that they are not alone, and make sure that their ideas can still be heard despite all these attempts at censorship. We propose the formation of a new organisation, the Conservative Academic Network Trust, to coordinate the activities of the academic underground. This will, for example, arrange plausible cover stories for those wishing to participate in clandestine seminars on imperialism without attracting the attention of the authorities, make and distribute homemade YouTube videos of inspirational lectures and interviews, and ensure the publication of forbidden ideas – preferably in multiple copies, to evade the censors.

We have already recruited academics willing to travel to ideological wastelands like Oxford and Stanford, ostensibly to deliver lectures on cultural Marxism and post-colonial gender theory, where they will be able to meet secretly with persecuted academics and hand over vital supplies of paper, green ink and tweed. But this requires money – more money than our few supporters among the proprietors of international media empires are able to provide. Please donate whatever you can. If simply being a conservative apologist for racism, sexism and imperialism is a thought crime, then we should all be Spartacus!

8 Chansons

I’ve been re-watching Francois Ozon’s magnificently silly comedy 8 Femmes – a wonderful means of relaxing, that can be enjoyed just as a bit of fun but offers so much more if you’re in the mood. If Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven offers one sort of hommage to the films of Douglas Sirk, revealing the real darkness and painful secrets within such stories, Ozon revels in the melodrama and visual sumptuousness. One of its glories, and of course the major selling-point, is the simple fact that it packs eight great French actresses into a snowed-in house with a murder mystery and eggs them on into acting off against one another in contrasting styles. I can’t help wishing for a Hearts of Darkness documentary in which we discover the real dynamic behind Catherine Deveuve hitting Danielle Darrieux with a bottle or wrestling on the floor with Fanny Ardant, or the multi-layered stares exchanged between Emanuelle Beart and Virginie Ledoyen. Or, even better, a Noises Off melodramatic comedy within the melodramatic comedy, not least given the fact that Ledoyen was pregnant during the filming as well as in the film…

The even greater thing about the film is the fact that each of the cast gets a musical number – and one way of understanding its particular style is to imagine that each of the cast is taking it in turns to be the human guest in an episode of The Muppets, playing it more or less straight in front of a chorus of singing animals. The songs are drawn from French pop music from the 1960s to the 1980s, which includes some wonderfully sad laments and lively pop numbers – all of which do, in different ways, offer a further commentary on the social roles and cultural expectations of women, by bringing the sentiments of earlier decades into the early twenty-first century. The great thing about re-watching today, of course, is the relative ease of tracking down the originals (most of which are on Spotify, and all on YouTube), and indeed the only reason I’m writing this post is to make available a compilation of those originals for anyone who’s interested…

https://www.podbean.com/media/player/kw55i-92b05b?from=yiiadmin

What I don’t know is how far these songs are intended to be very familiar to the main audience for the film, just in a different setting being sung by a famous actress – the equivalent of Moulin Rouge or that stupid Abba film – and how far this is about recovering and reinventing obscurities (or at least partly; even I’ve heard of Francoise Hardy, so the pleasure is hearing her ennui-soaked slices of misery reinterpreted by Isabelle Huppert and Danielle Darrieux). I didn’t get on with Moulin Rouge precisely because the songs were far too familiar (not to mention the brutal murder of one of the greatest pop-soul numbers ever), so encountering them in a different context felt very odd, whereas the songs in 8 Femmes feel much more appropriate in their new setting – and the questionable singing voices of some of the cast felt like less of an issue and more of a characterisation.

Take Dalida’s rendition of De ne pas vivre seul: powerful, well-trained voice, within a dramatic orchestral arrangement, cranking up the dramatic emotion. Firmine Richard hasn’t got half the range, and talks rather than sings half the time – but makes it a different song, defeated but defiant. Deneuve’s account of Toi jamais is fully in the spirit of the original, but delivered with more world-weary power and despair (and a much less annoying backing track), while Fanny Ardant turns a condemnation of flighty women who lead empty lives without love into a celebration of the bohemian life. Maybe French viewers sit there fuming about how Beart can’t sing as well as Corynne Charbry and Huppert has murdered their beloved Message personnel…

Sinew-racking

Another new pseudo-Thucydides quote – an increasingly rare event, not because the level of misattribution is dropping to any measurable degree but because it’s the same couple of familiar misattributions every time – as French Minister of Economy Bruno le Maire commented* in a private meeting for French businessmen about Trump’s imposition of sanctions on Iran and the funding of international terrorism: “money is the nerve of war”, attributing this to Thucydides.

Thucydides? No, Cicero; Philippics 5.5, to be exact, with “nervos belli, pecuniam infinitam”, an idea that’s then echoed or discussed by Quintus Curtius, Appian and numerous other people. It took me a while to realise this, as the more familiar English phrase is ‘sinews of war’. That’s what Cicero meant by nervos, of course (cf. the lengthy discussion in Vegetius on the use of nervi in catapults and other war engines, and hence the importance of stock-piling them). Certainly in the early modern period, the two words were used interchangeably in modern European languages too; for example in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Titus Livius (Book 2 Chapter X is dedicated to the question of whether “money is the nerve of war” is true or not, attributing the idea to Quintus Curtius), Rabelais’s Gargantua, and James Harrington’s Oceana, heavily influenced by Machiavelli, which explains the circumstances in which the maxim is true (France has a population that’s largely degenerate and Venice doesn’t have many people at all) and when it isn’t (the Romans didn’t have to worry, and neither should any well-ordered Commonwealth).

The idea of money being the ‘nerve of war’ was still being discussed in 1761, in an anonymous handbook of military advice (perhaps because that book was, or at least was presented as, a compilation of established wisdom). According to Google n-grams, however, ‘sinews of war’ has far out-stripped either ‘nerve’ or ‘nerves’ in every year except 1735-7 – usual caveats apply, but that’s a pretty clear graph. In France, however, “la nerf de la guerre” became established as the stock phrase.

How does Thucydides come into this? The obvious reason is that he (or rather one of his speakers; in this case Pericles, at 1.83) offers a similar claim byt without the anatomical analogy: “wars are won not by arms but by money”. It’s entirely possible that Machiavelli is engaging with this passage in the relevant section of the Discorsi, where he notes that despite Pericles’ claims, the outcome of the Peloponnesian War was the victory of the warriors of Sparta over the resources of Athens – indeed, I’m inclined to take this as evidence that Machiavelli had read Thucydides, something that’s still in dispute among scholars, as that specific idea doesn’t show up in any other ancient account of Pericles that I’m aware of. But that doesn’t lead Machiavelli, or any of those influenced by him, to attribute the specific line to Thucydides.

Initial Google searches produced very little, so I was starting to incline towards giving Le Maire credit for starting the whole thing – with the caveat that my skills in searching in French are definitely limited. There are indications that he’s used the phrase before – but it does seem to be an absolute cliche, and he uses it without any attribution to Thucydides that I can see. And even if Le Maire does make that connection, he isn’t the only one: a magazine article on the origins of the phrase specifically links it to Thucydides. Maybe this is our Patient Zero, but maybe not; further contributions to the paper-trail always welcome…

*I’m reliant for this on a blog post by one Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, founder of the Europe-Iran Forum; I haven’t managed to find any other report of the meeting, partly because my French isn’t good enough, but there’s no obvious reason why anyone would make up a Thucydides reference just to annoy me…