James Davidson

“The daemons of the monotheisms are essentially self-less. They have more authority than mere ‘messengers’, but a marginal kind of autonomy. Above all, they have no long-term relationships, no contract, no covenant, no faith. They are metaphysical butterflies, essentially promiscuous. They are not localised receivers and bestowers of gifts with continuing personalities and some discretion, but rather slavish or whorish, amenable to bribes, able to be booked for specific tasks, obedient to the secret commands of witches, priests, Beelzeboul, Jesus the Anointed or God, rather like wayward employees of a big corporation who have momentarily forgotten who really pays their wages.”

“Sometimes it seems that new conquests were undertaken merely so the king could look behind him at the colourful host of different kinds of soldier he was able to command, or so that his peoples could see themselves, as one more people was added to the collection . . . The king was ‘King of the countries containing all races’ or King of the peoples of many origins’, or just ‘King of Kings’. Too much Persianising of the provinces might seem to lessen an empire so conceived.”

For those suffering from millennial panic about the current state of history – all those Postmodernists on the non-fiction bestseller lists, all those fact-deniers occupying important professorial chairs, all those poor students who know what Marie Antoinette had for breakfast but not how she died – classics departments all over the country are offering courses of therapy: Alexander the Great.

Very occasionally, something like once every other year, a stranger, over-impressed by the way I’m standing, will say something like ‘you’re a dancer aren’t you’ and I will be enormously pleased. Any real chance of being a dancer was probably squashed for ever when I was ten and an audition with a proper ballet school in Manchester was cancelled in mysterious...