Return of the Stoa

I’m in Oxford for all of July, and Josephine has just disappeared off to Tunisia for a month, to improve her Arabic, so it seemed like it wasn’t a bad time to scribble in this space again, in case anyone’s paying attention. (If you are reading this, do say hello in the comments–I’ve no idea how many people are likely to stumble across the blog, after being quiescent for so long.)

To get things started again, I’ve given a light dusting to the blogroll, and I’ll mention a few of the entries here.

First of all, my brother Michael’s been dabbling in the world of blogs again. Three months ago he posted a number of pictures of Ships With Rude Names on a tumblr, so if you want to see what any of SS Beaverburn, the Happy Entrance, or HMS Spanker looked like, wander over there and have a look. More recently, and more substantially, he’s started a new blog–Bock! Bock! Bock!–in order to document his family’s new experiment with chickens.

Now for a couple of book-blogs. Marc Mulholland’s blog has started up again, this time posting snippets to discuss the themes of his new book, Bourgeois Liberty and the Politics of Fear, which is coming out from Oxford later this year. I think what happened here is that Marc’s full draft was much, much too long, and so the bits that had to but cut out are being exploited as a resource for the blog. There’s already some very interesting stuff up there, including this post, arguing against the conventional wisdom that the Second International ‘betrayed’ the European working class in the Summer of 1914.

And another old friend with an interest in Trotskyist historiography, Dave Renton, has a new blog to support his new book, Lives; Running, which is about, um, running. I didn’t know Dave was quite so interested in running, but it looks as if he really is, and he has various things to say about the Olympics, too.

For those of us who have been blogging for too long, it will always be 2002-4 or thereabouts. So in addition to Marc Mulholland’s return, it’s good to see that Nick Barlow has stepped back from his Lib Dem Council responsibilities in Colchester in order to post a lot of stuff about the Tour de France. And Jamie Kenny’s indestructible Blood & Treasure just goes on and on, and he now promises a parallel book-blog sometime in the not too distant future, and that should be great fun.

I’ll leave you now, with a chicken video from Mike:

23 thoughts on “Return of the Stoa”

  1. Well I am reading, but will be away myself shortly (in Penarth) so may have to catch up. I expect by then to see some cats.

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  2. I’ll always read Virtual Stoa, Chris, and I will be “bigging it up” on Giroscope (in the absence of posting any readable content of my own on Giroscope… which is something I really ought to do, like, today.)

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  14. Chris,
    Glad too to see the return of VS and thanks for the link.

    Together with staring at Tv screens whispering prayers of hope in the direction of small blobs dressed in red, and playing in a punk band so bad that our own supporters egged us off the stage, running was one of the things which kept me happy before I had the chance to be political. You’re right – I kept all of that past well under wraps for most of my 20s.

    V happy to report that I’m now in the same running club as two other veterans of the Balliol Left Caucus – John A and Alice S. Not sure if they approve of the blog though…

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  16. Yes, welcome back. As it happens, I was just regretting the absence of the Stoa after failing to get a comment onto the hair thread on facebook, a far inferior medium which I can never fully master. It was Tito’s trenchant comment to Time magazine in 1951; ‘Stalin is known the world over for his mustache, but not for his wisdom’.

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