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June 6, 2019This is the perfect Goodreads book - a collection of old book reviews. Taken from the Times literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, slightly reworked,starting from the 1990s but mostly from this century.
They are lively and witty pieces, all of the books reviewed are from the field of Classics, Mary Beard being Mary Beard only three (if my count be true) get an unambiguous thumbs up, this is possibly a spoiler, so if you don't want to know look away now - Asterix and the Actress, Bilingualism and the Latin Language, and another one which I have forgotten, as you can tell I wasn't taking notes.
The others are weighed in the balance, and if not exactly always found wanting, at least probed and questioned. Some of the books that she enjoys too, are far from perfect, she finds T.P. Wiseman's Remus: A roman Myth quite inspired even if she is plainly not entirely convinced by his belief that various Roman myths were created and fixed in the Roman imagination by a series of plays (none of which unfortunately have survived, and for none of which is there any evidence that they ever had existed in the first place) she chews up a few biographies of Emperors (Augustus and Hadrian) like a lion gnawing on an antelope so that I was eventually impressed by the boldness of writers in dumping four hundred pages plus of mostly speculation on the reading public that entirely avoids the substantive political issues of their reigns. The problem it emerges is not a shortage of source material, it is not even biographies themselves as a concept, the problem is the desire to write cradle to grave biographies of the sort you can buy about our contemporaries.
In one passage she is discusses the (baleful) influence of Robert Graves' I Claudius on academic assumptions about Augustus and his wife Livia, mentioning how low budget it was and how it was tarted up and made to look classier for USA audiences for example by cutting the scene in which Caligua tells Claudius that he has carried out a caesarian on his sister and eaten their baby (he was the father), and then digresses to Robert Graves attending an opening night party for the actors for an earlier stage version. At the party Graves insisted that Jesus lived until he was eighty and after the end of his public career devoted his time to inventing spaghetti (not the best use of his time as the fork was not in common use in the region for centuries to come), Graves gave a magic stone to the cast to ensure the success of the show - it was a flop.
This is a book that probably requires you to know a bit of ancient history, but I found her discussions of Thucydides (his Greek is so obscure that scholars are still in the process of working out what he might have been saying - none of which has stopped Donald Kagan from using him to advance his theories on how he believes the Cold war should have been fought), Cicero, the removal and restoration of plundered Art (which curiously enough never goes back to where it was taken from).
Anyway as it was one of those days when I had to go on a journey and in this case spend the best part of four hours on buses having a new topic to read about every eight or so pages was just about perfect, I didn't even notice going past the "Pig and Butcher" pub.
Ideal as well as a Goodreads book, she closes with a mini-manifesto for reviewing:reviews are a crucial part of the ongoing debate that makes a book worth writing and publishing; and they are a way of opening up the conversation that it provokes to a much wider audience (p.284).
They are lively and witty pieces, all of the books reviewed are from the field of Classics, Mary Beard being Mary Beard only three (if my count be true) get an unambiguous thumbs up, this is possibly a spoiler, so if you don't want to know look away now - Asterix and the Actress, Bilingualism and the Latin Language, and another one which I have forgotten, as you can tell I wasn't taking notes.
The others are weighed in the balance, and if not exactly always found wanting, at least probed and questioned. Some of the books that she enjoys too, are far from perfect, she finds T.P. Wiseman's Remus: A roman Myth quite inspired even if she is plainly not entirely convinced by his belief that various Roman myths were created and fixed in the Roman imagination by a series of plays (none of which unfortunately have survived, and for none of which is there any evidence that they ever had existed in the first place) she chews up a few biographies of Emperors (Augustus and Hadrian) like a lion gnawing on an antelope so that I was eventually impressed by the boldness of writers in dumping four hundred pages plus of mostly speculation on the reading public that entirely avoids the substantive political issues of their reigns. The problem it emerges is not a shortage of source material, it is not even biographies themselves as a concept, the problem is the desire to write cradle to grave biographies of the sort you can buy about our contemporaries.
In one passage she is discusses the (baleful) influence of Robert Graves' I Claudius on academic assumptions about Augustus and his wife Livia, mentioning how low budget it was and how it was tarted up and made to look classier for USA audiences for example by cutting the scene in which Caligua tells Claudius that he has carried out a caesarian on his sister and eaten their baby (he was the father), and then digresses to Robert Graves attending an opening night party for the actors for an earlier stage version. At the party Graves insisted that Jesus lived until he was eighty and after the end of his public career devoted his time to inventing spaghetti (not the best use of his time as the fork was not in common use in the region for centuries to come), Graves gave a magic stone to the cast to ensure the success of the show - it was a flop.
This is a book that probably requires you to know a bit of ancient history, but I found her discussions of Thucydides (his Greek is so obscure that scholars are still in the process of working out what he might have been saying - none of which has stopped Donald Kagan from using him to advance his theories on how he believes the Cold war should have been fought), Cicero, the removal and restoration of plundered Art (which curiously enough never goes back to where it was taken from).
Anyway as it was one of those days when I had to go on a journey and in this case spend the best part of four hours on buses having a new topic to read about every eight or so pages was just about perfect, I didn't even notice going past the "Pig and Butcher" pub.
Ideal as well as a Goodreads book, she closes with a mini-manifesto for reviewing:reviews are a crucial part of the ongoing debate that makes a book worth writing and publishing; and they are a way of opening up the conversation that it provokes to a much wider audience (p.284).
