Month: September 2016

I am interested in politics, but I don’t follow the day to day political coverage very much. I do have the occasional binge. I get caught up sometimes in a big story like an election or a big scandal. But this is pretty much like someone who has got their eating disorder under control having the odd relapse. A daily diet of news stories spun by the politicians themselves and filtered through a media owned by vested interests is much like eating fast food. It feeds a craving, and you enjoy it at the time, but doesn’t really give you what you need.

We’ve all got used to social media and communicating over the internet. We instinctively know what the real meaning of a lot of communications are.  You can tell that an email or a message on Twitter is not genuine even without reading the whole thing. But put yourself in the place of an historian looking back on the 21st century from a 1,000 years in the future. Human nature probably won’t be very different, but the social context will have changed enormously.  Many of the social conventions we regard as so obvious we hardly even feel the need to notice let alone explain will be far from obvious any more.  There will probably be a thesis written on exactly what LOL means. Our future digital historian might well ponder statistics about how many plaintive tweets went unanswered and ponder how lonely people using Twitter used to be in the early years of the twentieth century.  As to what they will make of Twitter exchanges between famous people – well we all know that their accounts are run by their offices.  But how do we know that?  Again, taken out of context would it make any sense?

You can’t doubt Mary beard’s academic credentials, but she has written SPQR for the general reader. She starts the story with Cicero and the Cataline conspiracy. We get the characters involved and we get a description of what the world the action is taking place in looked like. This is history as entertainment, and it is very entertaining. But that doesn’t stop it also being very informative.

The Goths were far from out of the running and although they had pulled back from Rome they still held plenty of territory in northern Italy, had a very strong base in Ravenna and were mobile and numerous enough to counterattack at any time.