The Virtual Stoa

Quas res melius aliis gentibus gesserunt Britanni? Neque in sphaeristica, ut puto, neque in coquina neque in fabulis musicis fingendis omnibus antecellunt. Sed si fabulas ad puerorum delectationem inventas examinaverimus, adfirmare fortasse audebimus nullum esse populum quem ea in arte non superaverimus. Praeterea, magna pars eorum qui libros pueris optime scripserunt Oxoniam nostram habitavit; plerique in hac universitate studuerunt atque docuerunt. Tamesis prope ripam Grahameius ventum inter salices susurrantem audivit; qui etiam hac in urbe est sepultus. Oxoniae Alicia terram mirabilium intravit; Oxoniae gens hobbitorum nata est; Oxoniae porta ad Narniam est aperta. At hic quem nunc produco hunc ipsum locum vel maioribus laudibus ornavit, quippe qui in suis fabulis Oxoniam lepide descripserit et, ut ita dicam, dramatis sui personam fecerit.

Primus Carolus Kingsley, ut videtur, cum de infantibus aquaticis scriberet, id genus fabulae invenit quod puerum vel pueros in alium mundum transfert et aliquando in nostrum rursus reducit. Quem secutus est Ludovicus Carolus, ubi Aliciam ad terram mirabilium et per speculum misit, postea etiam is qui de Petro Pane scripsit, mox Clivus Lewis, denique hic quem hodie videmus. Hoc tamen modo ab aliis differt, quod mundo illo ficto ad naturam animi humani scrutandam usus est. Socrates quidem daemonis se monitu saepe corrigi credidit; hic daemona unumquemque hominem, sive iuvenis sit sive senex, manifeste comitari fingens, arcana indolis et ingenii nostri in apertum protrahit. Itaque cum puerulos delectat innumerabiles, tum lectores adultos alicit atque arrigit. Quare ut Horatius Romanae se lyrae fidicinem vocavit, ita nos Lyrae Oxoniensis cantorem salutemus.

Praesento textorem fabularum sollertissimum, Philippum Nicolaum Outram Pullman, Excellentissimi Ordinis Britannici Commendatorem, Collegii Exoniensis et alumnum et socium honoris causa adscriptum, ut admittatur honoris causa ad gradum Doctoris in Litteris.

[over the fold for the translation]

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My friend Josh Cherniss has asked me to advertise the forthcoming conference on Isaiah Berlin at Harvard, featuring Svetlana Boym, Ioannis Evrigenis, Peter Eli Gordon, Malachi Hacohen, Stanley Hoffmann, Erin Kelly, Janos Kis, Pratap Mehta (hooray!), Louis Menand, Martha Nussbaum, Nancy Rosenblum, Emma Rothschild, Alan Ryan, T.M. Scanlon, Amartya Sen, Michael Walzer and Bernard Yack.

It’s on 25 and 26 September later this year in the Tsai Auditorium in the CGIS building, 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge MA 02138, USA. And, this being the twenty-first century and all, the conference even has its own blogsite.

As ejh observes in comments below, John Saville has died. Obituary by Eric Hobsbawm (another ejh) in tehgraun over here. The Dictionary of Labour Biography is still going strong, and now runs to 12 volumes.

Giovanni Arrighi, RIP.

Over here.

Peter Gowan, author of The Global Gamble and regular contributor to the New Left Review, died on Friday. A brief report is here, and a statement from his family here.

I’ve just heard the sad (but not unexpected news) that the beat poet Harold Norse has died aged 92. I spent the Summer of 1999 living in an apartment on Albion St in San Francisco’s Mission District, Harold lived around the same building, and we’d run into him from time to time when he was collecting his post.

Peter Townsend, who devoted his life to understanding and fighting poverty, died yesterday. There’s a tribute over here.

Blears resigns!

This week has been a fantastic week for Gordon Brown’s “Britishness” agenda, as two events have united the people of Britain as almost never before.

First, the people of Britain came together to support Barcelona in the final of the Champions League (with the exception of a small handful in the Northwest of England). Second, we are (almost) all of us delighted to welcome a dozen Norwegian beavers into the wild (with the exception of a small handful within fifty miles or so of the beaver-reintroduction zone in Scotland).

I’m feeling fairly patriotic this week, at any rate, certainly much more than usual.

The Virtual Stoa, eight years old today.

No idea what that was about, but apparently the comments have been screwy for a while, and yesterday the whole site collapsed and all the archive pages disappeared. But it all seems to be back working again now, I think.

UPDATE [27.5.2009]: And I’ve even remembered to turn off the “must be logged in to post comments” feature, which somehow managed to switch itself on.

Something has gone fantastically right with the world when this headline appears on the front page of a major newspaper website (it links to the story here, Google Earth image here).

Over here. (Can’t tell yet whether it’s an improvement.)

In order to free up some space on my shelves, I’ve got some runs of journals to give away to anyone who can collect them from me before too long. These include Political Studies (2000-present), Politics (2005-present), The British Journal of Politics and International Relations (2001-present) and the Political Studies Review (2006-present), Historical Materialism (an almost complete set up to the end of last year), and Index on Censorship (about eight years’ worth, I think, from the last decade or so).

If you’re interested, get in touch.