August | 2025 | Sphinx
4 posts published by NevilleMorley during August 2025| Sphinx
Wake up with a painful throat. Oh dear, here we go again. Air conditioning in this hotel? People in the train yesterday? People in the audience on Monday? A. had mentioned on Monday evening, as she…| Sphinx
On the one hand, what’s happening in the University of Chicago – the (supposedly temporary) suspension of recruitment to PhD programmes in Classics as well as other disciplines that require s…| Sphinx
It is of course distressing to realise that demand for my opinions on Thucydides is limited… Just over a fortnight ago I embarked on one of those “One like, one X” social media things on Blue…| Sphinx
“Generative AI tools offer significant opportunities to improve teaching and student learning.” Uh huh. The key question about the new American Historical Association guiding principles on th…| Sphinx
Ten years or so ago, I had a business idea. This is not something that often happens – precisely twice in my life, in fact, as my entrepreneurial (aka opportunistic) approach to research idea…| Sphinx
The first two hundred metres after they turned off the highway were fine. Then Gregor’s head hit the roof of the car as it reached the end of the decent tarmac and lurched down at least five centim…| Sphinx
In Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, one of my favourite novels of recent years, a mysterious and rather shady acquaintance of the narrator establishes a clinic for people suffering from Alzheimer’…| Sphinx
Unlike Thucydides, we made it to Amphipolis! Yes, I have been waiting over a year to make this joke.| Sphinx
It’s always interesting to realise how much I’ve unconsciously and unquestionably absorbed a set of assumptions. To judge from this week’s visit to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens with…| Sphinx
Thucydides of course anticipated the dynamics of social media.* On the one hand, there is the democratisation of opinion, with every Athenian citizen having not just a right but a duty to contribut…| Sphinx
You can’t spend a lot of time thinking about the modern reception of Thucydides without engaging with his place in Professional Military Education in the United States, which is plausibly responsib…| Sphinx
Thucydides may not be a wholly uncelebrated author, but it is rare that his name occurs in contexts outside politics and history – let alone in poetry or song; and so one of the rarer but not…| Sphinx
Tl;dr: massively over-interpreting a throwaway comment and extending a metaphor way beyond any reasonable point…| Sphinx
Woke from a deep, largely dreamless sleep at seven on the dot – which is six in British money, but still represents a significant improvement over the regular weekday alarm time of half five …| Sphinx
Over the last year or so, like other academics, I’ve received occasional emails from different publishers asking whether I’d be willing for my work to be included in any deal they might sign with G…| Sphinx
I am reasonably confident that my little brother does not read this blog, and nor does anyone who is likely to mention it to him. This is important, because I wouldn’t want him to think I was ungra…| Sphinx
As the apeirokinetic pantoustasis rolls ever onward, it is increasingly clear that this must be the darkest timeline.* It is at any rate the stupidest. Reason, analysis and theory have little purch…| Sphinx
The name of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff recurred time and again in the conference on Altertumswissenschaft and Historismus I was attending last week in London (one of the most intellectually…| Sphinx
There are times when a good night’s sleep is even more of an absolute necessity than usual. As a chronic insomniac who lives with three deranged and demanding cats, I’m used to getting by on the ba…| Sphinx
At the moment, there is always a point where part of my mind realises that I am emerging from deep sleep and tries to push down the thoughts that are starting to cohere (even about how I’m going to…| Sphinx
Two days after the event, I am still somewhat baffled as to what three of America’s leading avant-garde jazz musicians – Mary Halvorson, Michael Formanek and Tomas Fujiwara, playing and recor…| Sphinx
It’s a sign of the rapid expansion of Bluesky that it now looks as if it’s worth my while searching for ‘Thucydides’ every now and then, in order to wonder whether I should trouble to correct misqu…| Sphinx
It’s been a very interesting week on social media – specifically, BlueSky – with a mass influx of new users, the majority presumably fleeing Ex-Twitter in the aftermath of its owner’s e…| Sphinx
The indispensable starting-point of my project on GenAI and the assessment of historical skills last year was student consultation: via surveys, focus groups and some really excellent volunteers on…| Sphinx
…with my little eye, something that looks rather like generative AI. It’s been quite a while since the last new ‘Thucydides’ quote on Ex-Twitter (where @Thucydiocy remains active, though my p…| Sphinx
I had an interesting conversation the other week with one of my new Innsbruck colleagues about the effects of how one conceives of one’s area of study. One familiar image is that of the battlefield…| Sphinx
