Alex Mullen
View this author's profilePosts by Alex Mullen
Gout: the heroic malady?
January 26, 2016
Nick Wilshere muses on a ‘humorous’ painful disease: Painful chronic disease is not something that we generally consider a source of humour. Yet gout – inflammation of the joints, especially in the feet, caused by the formation of monosodium urate crystals – has a long history of being discussed in playful and humorous ways. As long ago …
Queen of the Silver Arrow competition
January 24, 2016
Prize: copy of Queen of the Silver Arrow, signed by Caroline Lawrence. Write a tweet or a blogpost (up to 500 words) to tell us how children’s literature or media has influenced your understanding of or enthusiasm for the Greeks and Romans. Were you inspired to become a classicist by reading Harry …
The challenge of Virgil as children’s literature
January 23, 2016
Helen Lovatt explores Virgil as YA literature: Caroline Lawrence has just published Queen of the Silver Arrow, an excellent retelling of Virgil’s Camilla episode, with Barrington Stoke, aimed at reluctant teenage readers. It is simply written, with a reading age of about 8, but contains challenging content more suitable for 12+. This makes it really …
From Aulis to Game of Thrones
January 22, 2016
Lynn Fotheringham tells us about the story of Iphigenia: I became fascinated with the story of the sacrifice of Iphigenia when I was a little girl. I first saw Cacoyannis’ 1977 film, Iphigenia, when taking a Greek-tragedy-in-translation course at Iowa State in what would now be called my ‘gap year’ in 1986—thanks, David Roochnik and …
Stagestruck: Interviewing Robert Icke
January 6, 2016
Lynn Fotheringham reports on an exclusive interview with Robert Icke: Recently I went down to London to interview Robert Icke of the Almeida Theatre for my forthcoming conference, Sacrificing Iphigenia Through the Ages. His mind-blowing modernisation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia (which he both wrote and directed) wowed London theatre-audiences this summer, first at the Almeida and …
Chorus girls – and boys
November 18, 2015
Lynn Fotheringham tells us about the creative challenges and opportunities of the Chorus. In the Horrible Histories Groovy Greeks[1] theatre-show, a family of supposedly late-arriving theatre-goers are sucked into the action to learn about ancient Greek culture. They are informed that the Greeks had democracy, the Olympics and theatre: that the actors (all male) wore masks, …
Effaced: the missing noses of classical antiquity
October 23, 2015
Mark Bradley explores an important cross-cultural phenomenon. A display cabinet in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, exhibits scores of disembodied noses (and various other appendages) from its Greek and Roman sculpture collections. This macabre collection of body parts was assembled in 1981 out of marble and plaster noses that had been deliberately removed by the …
Find, follow, join us
