Ancient Rome
Just how republican is Jeremy Corbyn?
True to his antique, bearded ideology, guru Corbyn is a ‘republican’, a form of government invented 2,500 years ago. ‘Republic’…
Boris’s waiting game
While the Labour party rakes over its past in an effort to find a policy for its future, the commentators…
Barometer
Gesture politics A royal home movie from 1933 apparently showed the future Queen, aged seven, and her mother giving a…
Vespasian vs Islamic State
As Ahmed Rashid argued last week, it is hard to see what the West is doing in the Middle East,…
Shaw hand
When is a rape not a rape? It’s an unsettling question — far more so than anything offered up by…
The game of survival
Apparently Fifa emperor Sepp Blatter received a ten-minute standing ovation from his 400 staff when he addressed them after his…
Pliny the Younger on Fifa
In any huge enterprise (like Fifa), where does the rot begin? Pliny the Younger mused on this question in a…
Caesar, Pompey and the SNP
Alex Salmond, the ex-first minister who proved incapable of making Scotland independent, has assured the world that he and his…
Rome’s 99 per cent
In the UK the richest 1 per cent — 300,000 — of the working population control 23 per cent of…
Survivors
Martin Gayford visits two new surveys of Greek and Roman sculpture at the British Museum and Palazzo Strozzi. Reimagining what’s lost is as much of an inspiration as what remains
Greeks vs Greens
The Green party’s manifesto appears to make saving the planet only a small element in its otherwise painfully unoriginal agenda.…
Hyperides vs Jack Straw
In responding as they did to the Daily Telegraph ‘sting’, Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind may well have done…
Julius Caesar vs Isis
Isis disseminates videos of beheaded captives to spread simple terror. Julius Caesar knew all about it. In his diaries of…
Socrates and Charlie Hebdo
What would the ancients have made of Charlie Hebdo? The First Amendment tolerates the expression of opinions, however offensive, but…
Oaths for MPs
Before taking their seats in Parliament, all MPs must swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen. Mark Durkan, MP…
How the Romans taught Latin
Barely a week passes without someone complaining about the teaching of English or foreign languages, usually because it involves too…
Send in the clowns
Nell Gifford joins a colourful troupe of acrobats, contortionists, lion-tamers, freaks and funambulists
Pain, brains and space planes
Explaining the death of a pilot testing a Virgin Galactic rocket-ship, Sir Richard Branson intoned: ‘I truly believe that humanity’s…
Hannibal vs the Islamic State
Whatever the Islamic State hopes ultimately to achieve by its current onslaught on all and sundry in the Middle East,…
Plutarch on the iPhone
Adults, we are told, as much as children, become gibbering wrecks if deprived of their mobiles or iPhones for more…
The Ancient way of death
There is something mildly unexpected about religious groups’ hostility to euthanasia. After all, in the ancient world one of the…
Caesar and Farage
Our politicians are desperately keen to turn the toast of the people, Nigel Farage, into toast himself. But is that…
Ancient Greek wealth taxes
After 685 tightly argued pages, the ‘superstar’ economist Thomas Piketty unfolds his master-plan for closing the gap between the rich…
Good teachers
Last week in The Spectator, Daisy Christodoulou argued that, contrary to current educational theory, children learned best via direct instruction…
Cicero on Putin
Last September Russian President Vladimir Putin warned against a ‘unipolar’ world, saying that the national revival of Russia was in…
