Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"He saw good men go down into a slow decline of hopelessness, broken as their vision of a decent life was broken..."

"Now and again he became so caught by his enthusiasm that he stuttered, gesticulated, and ignored the lecture notes that usually guided his talks. At first he was disturbed by his outbursts..."

"He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were a tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed: and he marvelled at the bitterness, the terror, and the barely concealed hatred he found in some of Christian poets of the Latin tradition..."

"He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were a tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed: and he marvelled at the bitterness, the terror, and the barely concealed hatred he found in some of Christian poets of the Latin tradition..."

Thomas Hardy resituated?

. ..people were dissatisfied with the arbitrary administration of justice, and insisted that offences and penalties should be defined in writing. - and common law came about because?

...as the worship of the souls of the dead and the deities of the underworld developed, the belief gained ground that he who shed blood was impure and needed cleansing....For when a member of a community was impure, the stain drew down the anger of the gods upon the whole community...Hence it came about that the state undertook the conduct of criminal justice. - from the law of the jungle to the law of God?

The Greek race never became a Greek nation; for the love of local independence. - Not Geography and technology?

"Thus discontented nobles came forward to make use of the popular discontent in order to subvert it." - sounds familiar :(

Sparta was not a place for thinkers or theorists; the whole duty of man and the highest ideal of life were contained for a Spartan in the laws of his city.

The remarkable thing was that through all these changes hereditary kingship survived. - Sparta vs UK

...but the new organised slave-system was destined to prove one of the most fatal causes of disease and decay to the states of Greece

Greek trade moved chiefly along waterways, and this is illustrated by the neglect of road making in Greece. There were no pathed roads, even in later times, except the Sacred Ways - trade was blasphemy?

It was only when private land ownership had become an established fact, that the law came in and recognised it - England, Hungary?

The dark ages remain dark for some three hundred years after the destruction of Mycenae, but by the eighth century - There were dark ages-es 😆

"Nixon liberates him to say anything - as Johnson liberated Merry" - and Trump? It must be one of the functions of the presidency :)

Parallels between the Iliad and Beowulf. They were written in exile, Homer lived in Chios not Mycenaea. They were written about foreign adventures, and they were written about the past.

...for In Mycenaean art there is no evidence of the segregation of the sexes typical of classical Greece.

Greece is by no means a rich and fruitful country...though good for barley is not rich enough for wheat...which tended to promote maritime enterprise.

...or a North Korean magnification of the sort of emotional outbursts we saw in the UK after the death Princess Diana. - interesting comparision :D

only some of the Sunni Iraqi tribes will support jihadist aims, and even then only to achieve their own aims.

The Islamists hark back to a golden age when Islam ruled an empire and was at the cutting edge of technology, art, medicine and government. - Not repression and retribution?

Water wars are considered to be among the coming conflicts this century. And [Ethiopia-Egypt] is one to watch.

who cannot be deported because of rulings from the European Court of Justice. - ECHR, surely?

"The UK ... always engaged in ensuring that no power greater than it will rise in Europe" - Alas, no more!

When the Cold War ended, so did the cheques. But Greece kept spending.

The problem is that there is too little... [agricultural land]... to allow Greece to ... develop more than a handful of areas containing highly educated, highly skilled and technologically advanced populations - how come Greece was historical able to do so?

The Americans own history of physical security and unity may have led them to overestimate the power of their democratic rationalist argument.