Claire Hall

Lot​ 9058, a damp-stained and mildewed medieval Greek liturgical book, went up for auction at Christie’s in New York on 29 October 1998. It was embroiled in controversy: the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem had already brought an injunction against Christie’s, claiming the book had been stolen from a monastery in Constantinople during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire....

Galen​ couldn’t stand gym bros. They were so occupied in the business of ‘amassing flesh’, he said, that they paid no attention to their souls, which were ‘smothered in a heap of mire’. Lucian, Galen’s contemporary, agreed. One of his short satires shows Hermes refusing to let a famous local beefcake called Damasius across the Styx to the underworld:...

Nietzsche​ found Anaximander troubling. In Basel in the 1870s, struggling to balance his duties as a lecturer in classics with his philosophical writing, Nietzsche described Anaximander as a ‘true pessimist’ with a guilt-ridden, punitive view of the universe. But he was also envious. Anaximander was born in 610 BC, long before the word ‘philosophy’ was coined: such...

It​ was an auspicious beginning: ♄☌♃. On 25 October 1979, the date of the first issue of the London Review of Books, Jupiter and Saturn were in conjunction in the sign of Virgo. Not only that, there was a triple conjunction of Venus, Mercury and the Sun (☉☌♀︎☌☿) in Scorpio. This suggested that the LRB would, according to the second-century astrologer Vettius Valens, be...