I have just been re-educated and I didn't feel a thing!

Actually, that is not quite true because what I did feel was intense pleasure, delight and wonderment mixed with shame at the lazy idleness I have nurtured through the years which has left me as a man filled with opinions but not much in the way of true learning.  So, thank the Gods, for (Sir William Robert, 3rd Baronet) Ferdinand Mount and his jewel of a book, Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back To Us.  It is typical of this man that he rarely if ever uses his title, and he carries his staggeringly huge learning with the lightest of ease.  And I do mean 'learning' in the very highest and best sense of the word.  He doesn't just read books on the innumerable, mind-boggling subjects on which he writes with such elegant ease, he goes out and inspects them, digs into their history, compares them with similar artifacts, takes account of the mores of their day, links them to events and artifacts of today, and then with the sort of wit that leaves you smiling and nodding in appreciation he offers some startling conclusions.

Perhaps the most startling is the main thrust of his book which is the proposition that, far from the progressive's dream of Mankind climbing ever higher and higher to new levels of civilisation, in fact we have just spent the last two thousand years going in Full Circle back to the Greeks and the Romans.  He points the finger, not of hostility but more of intellectual wonderment, at the last 2,000 years of Christianity which, whilst it, too, had its virtues, also acted as a big wet blanket on the behaviour of Man.  Now the blanket has dried out and is beginning to disintegrate under the unrelenting forces of "that old common arbitrator, Time" and, lo, we find ourselves returning in a mixture of surprise and delight to the truly ancien regime of the classical world.

Please, please, buy this delightful, witty and immensely learn-ed book.

 

Comments

[dearieme]

Cold Cream.

[Whyaxye]

I might just drop hints about the upcoming birthday. I read Mount's "The Subversive Family" many years ago and thought it was brilliant. His later book on social class ("Mind the Gap") was less good.

[David Duff]

OK, DM, I give up on your cryptic clue so please explain.

I must try and find those, 'W', thanks for the tip.

[dearieme]

Some time ago I instructed you to read his autobiography of that name.

Presumably you have not.

A hundred lines, Duff.

[Able]

Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant

It feels that way since our politicians are definitely subscribers to the Platonic philosophies.

Although..

Catapultam habeo. isi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane

Seems to be a favourite methodology of theirs.

Cogito, ergo doleo

Si hoc non legere potes, tu asinus es

Non plaudite. Modo pecuniam jacite

;-p

[rogerh]

'A gentleman may not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten it'. BTW, written at a time when 'one tongue is sufficient for a woman', so please include ladies.

I reckon the ancient writers are very good on psychology and politics - they wrote honestly at a time when their writings were confined to a ruling elite. Nowadays one has to be mindful of offending and of giving the game away.

[David Duff]

Sorry, DM, sir, but I've run out of book tokens until next Xmas when family and friends resupply. And of course, the hundred lines will be handed in promptly at 4.00pm!

Able, do me a favour! Poor old Google Translate nearly blew a gasket adn anyway can't you see I have a hundred lines to do for DM
before 4.00pm?

Roger, I infer from Mount's book that perhaps part of the reason for their openess was the absence of an all-pervasive religion like Christianity that at its height sat side by side with princes.

[JK]

"I infer from Mount's book that perhaps part of the reason for their openess was the absence of an all-pervasive religion like Christianity that at its height sat side by side with princes."

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/09/a-degenerate-sort-of-cult.html

[David Duff]

Well spotted, JK! Yet another subject that I intend to bore on later!