All in a Don's Day
Mary Beard
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 1846685362
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Her central themes are the classics, universities and teaching - and much else besides. In this second collection following on from the success of It's a Don's Life, Beard ponders whether Gaddafi's home is Roman or not, we share her 'terror of humiliation' as she enters 'hairdresser country' and follow her dilemma as she wanders through the quandary of illegible handwriting on examination papers and 'longing for the next dyslexic' - on whose paper the answers are typed, not handwritten. Praise for It's a Don's Life 'Delightful...it has the virtues of brevity, eclecticism and learning worn lightly...if they'd had Mary Beard on their side back then, the Romans would still have their empire' Daily Mail
verses that he is effeminate, then neither can you infer from his poetic threats of violent penetration that he is capable of that either. Get it? That would have been a much better defence for Mr Lowe. First rule for undergraduates: always check where the quote actually comes from! Comments As JN Adams wrote in what, but for the unfortunate overtones, might be called his seminal work, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary, ′Catullus′ “pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo” scarcely indicates a real
hypocritical, when that happens, to point the finger. (I’m not sure if ethical fund-raising is any more feasible than an ethical foreign policy.) I feel conflicted on this one. Half of me wants nothing to do with it and thinks that we should fund universities etc. properly from the public purse (however ethically tainted that may or may not be). The other half thinks that getting money from the bad and turning it to good ends might be a positive thing to do. I certainly suspect that many of the
has in this case. Comments I′m pretty sure that the reason he showed it to Blair was that he expected the Prime Minister to call up the LSE and quietly tell them that they′d better give him a PhD or else … After all, isn′t that the way things were done in Libya? MARKS Just as amusing as requests for assistance are supposed answers to long-standing problems, discoveries of the key to the Universe, claims of royal blood and entitlement to the kingdom and so on. Littlewood, in A
employment – but even if it didn’t, we surely don’t think that school is all about jobs: what about EDUCATION?) More to the point is the question of what we think mottoes are for. I’ve never been much of a fan of obscuring stupid ideas under a veil of Latin (as if translating stupidity into a ‘dead’ language suddenly made it clever). But I do think mottoes are best when they are a bit mystical, a tiny bit puzzling (which is presumably why Latin mottoes are a favourite of football clubs). I would
toe-hold in there too. That’s because, somewhere lurking behind our celebrations (though, in truth, the connections are a bit hard to follow) is the Roman festival of Saturnalia – eventually a seven-day holiday at the end of December; just like our Christmas break, it got longer as time went on. There’s nothing a Classicist likes doing better at this time of year than sounding off about the similarities and differences between our festivities and the Romans’. The basic point is that the