Trundling by train across Wessex on a day of perfect blue skies, apart from brief patches of dense fog, and all outlined by hard frost, the British countryside in Winter cannot be beaten.

Argument for "Steal away" as the single best piece of music to ever come out of America?

Final push for this piece

My first substack post can be found here: open.substack.com/pub/astrocla...

One sad/amusing part of this is that his take was politely queried by an expert in Roman law (and not on political grounds) and Vermeule chose to have strop and unfollowed him

Almost as funny as Caroline Ellison, SBF's business and sometimes romantic partner, being the daughter of the world leading expert on the Prisoners Dilemma (she flipped on SBF almost immediately and got a much shorter sentence than him)

Working on the material for a paper I'm giving in Istanbul in January, and in a day's work I have increased the number of questions, and not come to any firm answers.

@bretdevereaux.bsky.social the hoplite blog series is making its way onto all my undergraduate reading lists as I do my post-term revisions and updates, it really is a fantastic set of discussions

the twelve days of christmas - and I cannot emphasise this enough - are 25 December - 5 January. we are not currently in a day of christmas. marketing departments stop it. STOP IT

Come back quite often to Weber's viva, and what a moment this must have been (from this article on Weber's Dissertation journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...)

Since I start tomorrow, I thought it was time for a bio update: excited to say that I'll be taking up a half-time role as Curatorial Assistant for Greek coinage at the Ashmolean. So expect/beware more Greek and Roman Provincial coinage from this account over the next few years

Excited to discover which mad branch of French pretenders is rushing to hold a coronation with the stolen jewels

Am I being blind, or has the BBC website not published an article on the death of Tony Harrison?

The presenter on Radio 3 describing Newman as an Anglican priest in his intro to tonight's performance of Gerontius somewhat missing important developments in his career!

dudes rock

@youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com the name list, Marie, the name list. Laugh! Listen! Act! is the name of a CBBC show from the late 90s with an earworm theme tune (at least one presenter has since suffered damnatio memoriae for obvious reasons)

Rereading Aristophanes before I lecture on him this term and well difficult to escape the truth that honestly we've not innovated that many jokes in the last 2.5 thousand years, they are all already here

Thanks to @yuanyiz.bsky.social 's review this astonishingly stupid quote from Clegg's new book is going to be rattling around my head all day

Fascinated that In Our Time is one of the BBC’s most popular podcasts among under 35s. The young people demand three academics and a peer discussing Demosthenes, apparently. And they’re right to do so.

Watched every episode of House with my mum, who loved the show, as a consultant paediatric radiologist. She did always enjoy working out what condition the scans they put up *actually* showed vs what the show claimed they did.

My two favourite examples of this: 1) Marine Science centre in Newport, Oregon, allowing me to send videos of the amazing fog generating machine 2) halfway along the Grand Canal onboard a vaporetto

Very jealous of whoever gets to spend several years zapping the *first* coins with subatomic particles

HOW COOL IS THIS!?! A fully funded doctorate using cutting edge technology to study electrum!!! I can vouch for this being a truly open search with some of the best minds in both fields!! www.arch.ox.ac.uk/article/exci...

Never ask postdocs what they'll be doing next year, that's considered terribly offensive in their culture.

Tom Lehrer was simply the funniest man, and I'm forever grateful for the chain of passing down appreciating his songs from my grandmother to my mother to me.

Some of the coolest work in the field being done by @tsommerschield.bsky.social and others! Amazing productivity gains for researchers.

bsky.app/profile/anti... Fascinating site, which I'd never come across before

Deep within the Andes, a rough drive from Popayán, lies one of the pre-Colombian Americas’ most fascinating and least known sites - the hypogea of Tierradentro. Here mysterious chambers are scattered through a remote valley, plundered by grave robbers but only properly excavated in the 1930s… /1

Officially Dr Clarke

Needs two more panels where Persia holds out a couple of large sacks of silver and they immediately return to fighting

Underreported by our ancient written sources about Augustus was that he derived some of his political power from having the goddess Nike as his personal hairdresser. rpc.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/coins/1/2691

Visited Hughenden Manor on Sunday as an escape from Oxford for the first time in weeks. Perfect sized country house and parkland for a few hours wandering - particularly enjoyed the various techniques the Disraelis employed to get gothic ceilings cheaply.

Prousias II of Bithynia with some impressively curly sideburns on this coin (later on he has some quite stylish stubble)

All glory to the Hypnotoad!

I really hope this is what you see when you use the spray on.ft.com/3Gr8zCi

Recently came into possession of fascinating documents for family history: 1) the recollections of a great great grandfather, going back to his grandfather (born 1748) 2) the admittance records of (on another side of the family) my great great grandmother to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orp...

While looking through the coinage of Magnesia on the Maeander, I had to chuckle at this Roman era coin I stumbled upon. The description of the reverse says "infant Dionysus seated right on cista mystica around which is coiled a serpent" but I see something else... rpc.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/coins/7.1/56...

Attended a seminar where we got to hear recitation of the only surviving text of a language over 3000 years old, which we have but a limited understanding of, which survives because it was quoted in another language's text. As always, ancient history provides glorious and dizzying perspective.

Should really make this a thread, of pieces I would like to read. Latest one: Who were the geniuses behind the extremely successful pistachio marketing push of the last couple of years?

This wonderful coin from Mallos in Cilica (c. 340-330 BC) had passed me by before - on the reverse, Nike is carving her own name, part of the legend, with a stylus! greekcoinage.org/iris/id/mall...

(with a pained expression) We must make economies dearest. Our station is not what it was. The daily £6 baked good and oat flat white, that must go (my small sturdy son, on the verge of tears) And what of Father's Mubi subscription?

Not very good photos, but one of the many aspects I loved about the RSC's Titus Andronicus is that the stage itself is inscribed with lines from Ovid's version of Philomela and Tereus (the text becomes ever more legible to the audience as more blood is spilled across it through the two acts)

Because we've both got work commitments, we can't get to Stratford-upon-Avon this evening until c.6:30/6:40. Looking for practical recommendations for dinner in the short gap between then and the play starting at 7:30, or am I just better off putting together a picnic dinner?

Today I'm going through the wonderful but desperately understudied silver double sigloi issued by Pamphylian Aspendus pleiades.stoa.org/places/638776. This 5th-4th centuries coinage, wrestlers/slinger was minted in great quantities, and almost certainly associated with funding the Persian fleet.

living the dream of every historian and submitting an article draft which explicitly shits on political scientists for being lazy

Another day, another tourist lost in Wellington Square, a picture of Tom Tower on their phone, looking confused. (I gave them the necessary directions)

Thinking about your 2023 piece @stephenkb.bsky.social on Sunak as micromanager - have you ever written up a take on "here's what a PM's average daily diary should ideally look like ". 1) wondering how Starmer's time is actually divided and how that feeds into (or doesn't) the current issues 1/2

A friend else-net, noting what a nightmare covering a papal conclave must be for journalists who work for rolling news channels, suggested that they should get the Test Match Special team to do the commentary instead.