Henry Day is writing his doctoral dissertation on Lucan, Seneca and the sublime at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was only recently an intern at the LRB.
In 1346, after a four-month voyage from Sumatra, Ibn Battutah reached China. A devout Muslim, he was now far beyond the boundaries of the Dar al-Islam and the sway of the sharia, and was feeling nervous: ‘China, for all its magnificence, did not please me. I was deeply depressed by the prevalence of infidelity, and whenever I left my lodging I saw many offensive things which distressed...
The Anabasis, as The Expedition of Cyrus is often called, stands out among classical Greek texts for the glimpses it offers of Hellenes encountering a baffling and often dangerous alien world. A mishmash of military memoir, travelogue and biography, it’s also the most detailed description we have of Greek soldiers on campaign. The story opens with the rebellion in 401 BC of the Persian...
Circumstantial evidence suggests the traditional left is alive and well in Berlin. My neighbourhood is full of posters printed with Marx's picture and slogans such as 'Marx is Back' and 'Permanent Crisis: we're not paying!' Thanks to the recession, Kreuzberg's May Day demonstrations were livelier than they've been for some time: more flaming mattresses, more paint-bombed buildings, more arrests. And at the Freie Universitaet the only party with any discernible campaign presence in the run up to the European elections was the uncompromisingly anti-capitalist Die Linke, a part-successor to East Germany's old SED.
You can hardly turn a corner in Passau without stepping into a church. The town has dozens of them, large and small, old and new, some of them empty, most of them full. This is, after all, deepest Bavaria, the heartland of German Catholicism. The last pope was born a few miles up river in the village of Marktl am Inn.
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