Search Results

“... maintaining that it’s all in good fun and shouldn’t be taken (too) seriously’. According to John Lindow’s ‘unnatural history’ of trolls, the original trolls of Scandinavian folklore punished improper behaviour and upheld social norms. If you take the behavioural code of lulz seriously and erase any commitment to social norms, what you are ...”

“... near the centre of Woodhenge was for a long time thought to be a victim of a barbaric ritual, like Lindow Man, who seems to have been strangled, hit on the head and had his throat cut; but in 2000 it was realised that the child’s skull had parted along unclosed suture lines – no axe was involved. She may have been buried normally and reverently. Hutton ...”

“... the service of preconceived ideas. The ‘interpretative status’ of the 2000-year-old body of Lindow Man, recovered from a peat bog in Cheshire and apparently ritually killed in three ways, by club, garrotte and knife, with mistletoe pollen in his stomach, is ‘thoroughly insecure’: the garrotte could be a corroded necklace, the four grains of pollen ...”

“... What​ have the Romans ever done for us?’ John Cleese asks in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. His audience, not realising his question is rhetorical, replies: aqueducts, sanitation, medicine, public order, etc etc. Guy de la Bédoyère, on the other hand, doesn’t need a list: the Romans’ most important legacy, he suggests in his new book, is literacy, and specifically the habit of written memorialisation ...”