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 reminds me, that my glands looked as if they might be up, which would then suggest that this started […]| 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 Bluesky, and was initially quite overwhelmed – just as I thought I was starting to catch up with the number […]| 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 the use of Generative AI in history education is whether they have signed up to the idea that this is the inevitable, irresistible Future in a spirit of fanatical […]| 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
Woke from a deep sleep, albeit with very peculiar dreams involving a complicated journey across a city that I can’t place but seems very familiar. It’s the first really good sleep I’ve had for at least a week; back in my own bed, with my own pillow rather than an uncomfortable combination of a pillow […]| Sphinx
He looked at the new homepage of the University of Warwick, and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that university senior management teams are no longer even remotely human. It’s not just the excessive use of mauve, or the aversion to definite pronouns, or the vacuous slogan. It’s not even the fact that the very […]| Sphinx
Well, I hope that the Roman environmental historians are all set for a bit of public engagement and explanation, because Reform UK, Durham Sturmbannabteilung, has decided to weaponise a bit of anci…| Sphinx
The grand tour continues. Hello Warszawa! Sorry, Wrocław! Is it time for Thucydides on atheism, or the lessons of history, or powerlessness, or something else entirely? Partly because I talk more happily from notes than reading a prepared text – not least because non-anglophones apparently enjoy listening to my old-fashioned BBC English regardless of whether […]| Sphinx
The Panopticon is here, people! At any rate for our youngest cat, the indefatigable Hector. I’m currently on a sort of academic road trip – if it’s Tuesday, it must be Wrocław; what am I supposed to be talking about at this conference..? – and because my wife gets anxious about the cats when I’m […]| Sphinx
Groggy. So groggy. I don’t know if this is the result of a really heavy week of work, or the weather, or the small glass of beer I had last night. Slept deeply with strange dreams that I don’t reme…| Sphinx
In theory, and at least partly in practice, the fact that I’m on a two-year research fellowship means that I can adopt a somewhat laisser-faire, sufficient unto the day, mañana mañana attitude to a…| 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
Not a great night; I’ve fallen into a pattern of sleeping more or less soundly until around half three or four, then start to feel myself emerging from slumber, and struggle to stop thoughts of wor…| Sphinx
We have some new neighbours. My wife, being herself, has now visited them several times; I, being myself, have confined social contacts to a brief conversation about trees, power lines and squirrel…| Sphinx
It’s a clear sign of the parlous state of the British economy that even the Prime Minister cannot afford an umbrella. Either that, or yesterday’s announcement was somehow intended to communicate th…| Sphinx
