I was on my way a few days ago to do a reading at a college bookstore, and I had the loveliest supper with some of my North Carolina cousins before we all headed over to the reading itself. Our hosts – my cousins Fran and Stuart – live in an impossibly charming and quirky […]
My niece Sabrina gave me a marvellous gift yesterday. It was an invitation to visit a Wiccan coven in the outskirts of Decatur, Georgia, as they were preparing to celebrate the Full Moon. Wicca is a branch of modern Paganism, but as someone who studies one of the ‘new religions’ of the Roman Empire – […]
This week begins a run of talks and readings I’m giving in the UK and the US to try to get people to see how different early Christianity looks if you think about it from the point of view of women and families. Thinking about the daily life of women in the Roman provinces in […]
Over the past few days, I have been at the University of Tuebingen with a lovely group of scholars and students, part of an Anglo-German project on Memory and Power in late antiquity and the early middle ages. The idea behind the project is to try to understand the compromises made by the writers of […]
A number of people have been writing about Cleopatra in the past few days, spurred by the fiftieth anniversary of the marvellous Elizabeth Taylor film of the same name and by the exhibit that has just opened in Rome, where the film was shot. One of the most magnetic topics to arise from the excitement […]
I’ve just returned from two days in Scotland, attending a symposium to mark the retirement of Professor Jill Harries, a brilliant historian who has changed how scholars understand the fall of the Roman empire. Jill is one of those indispensable people whose sense of humour is as sharp as her intellect. Over the years she […]
My favourite among this week’s viral images has been the Dutch Graphic Designer Noortje van Eekelen’s Pantone Merkel, a tiled grid comparing postage-stamp sized images of the German Chancellor, who was forming a new government yesterday after being re-elected for the second time. The New York Times hailed Merkel yesterday as ‘the most powerful politician […]
