Karl Marx spent almost twenty years working on his first substantial book, Das Kapital, which came out in 1867, when he was nearly fifty. But as far as he was concerned, it was only ‘a fragment’, and he promised to add further volumes over the following months and years. He worked hard but failed and failed again, piling up a vast derangement of rejected drafts, and eventually abandoning hope of leaving a viable intellectual legacy. When he died, however – in 1883, at the age of 64 – his friend Friedrich Engels commandeered his archive and devoted the remaining twelve years of his life to building the vast edifice which, though now known to the world as Marxism, is perhaps a massive obstacle to the understanding of Karl Marx.

Western Sovietology had just passed its 45th birthday when the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed – an event unpredicted by Sovietologists or almost anyone else. Russia and the successor states are still dealing with the fallout, and so are Western Russia-watchers. In the days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was the West’s enemy because it was communist; Putin’s Russia is not communist, but it remains the enemy. Looking back on half a century as a Soviet and Russia watcher, Sheila Fitzpatrick compares the old Cold War to the new one, and considers what the comparison means for our understanding of post-Soviet geopolitics.

‘So may the gods grant all your heart’s desires,’ Odysseus says to Nausicaa in Book VI of the Odyssey, ‘a home and husband, somebody likeminded.’ Likemindedness is a motif that runs through Homer’s poem, which is full of connections and divisions both across human cultures and between humans and other species and landscapes. And yet the poem is also interested in many-mindedness, and the possibilities for misunderstandings, miscommunications and deceit. In this lecture, Emily Wilson reflects on the themes of empathy, connection and multiplicity in Homer and other ancient literature, and considers what links contemporary cultures to antiquity and what separates them from it.