Tag: Greek history
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Thucydides on the plague in Athens
In the bath the other morning I happened to catch an interview with the novelist Kamila Shamsie. She was asked what books she’d want to have with her if the coronavirus forced her to self-isolate for a lengthy period. She had some interesting choices. And she recommended that, instead of raiding supermarkets for toilet rolls…
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The Sicilian Expedition: a second Brexit footnote
After the 2016 Brexit referendum I suggested that the historian Thucydides, in the fifth century BC, can help us to understand how democracies have the capacity to change their decisions on major policies – and both the capacity and the duty to do so when those decisions are clearly, in retrospect, unwise or disastrous. A…