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“... Erudite controversies serve a variety of purposes. On the lowest count they afford nutriment, unfailing even if meagre, to tired and traditional topics. Industry reaps easy reward since bibliographies abound. There is a further benefit if the evidence never offered prospects of a solution. A number of problems, ostensibly historical, are devoid of substance ...”

“... collected in these volumes, there has been a revolution in the study of Roman history in which Ronald Syme has played a part comparable with that of Augustus in the revolution which his most famous book describes. When his career began, that study was still dominated by the gigantic figure of Theodor Mommsen, who was born in 1817 and died in 1903, the ...”

“... by ponderous appeals to the work of an ill-assorted range of academic luminaries: from Lacan to Ronald Syme; from Mary Douglas to Nietzsche. It is not that Douglas’s views on the Abominations of Leviticus and on the symbolic role of ‘the anomalous’ are no longer interesting. But, at least in the page-long summary by Hughes-Hallett, they are an ...”

“... model of our own. I believe the only two others who have won this double are Henry Moore and Sir Ronald Syme. Nothing could be more interesting than to learn such a man’s views on unilateral nuclear disarmament, the Greenham Common women, the exhaustion of fossil fuels and the fitness of women for Holy Orders, but Todd had no intention of writing any ...”

“... the propaganda of the victor of Actium and see the Roman Revolution as it looked to the loser, Ronald Syme wrote about Cicero in the ironic and hostile tone of Antony’s partisan Asinius Pollio: ‘Cicero was a humane and cultivated man, an enduring influence on the course of all European civilisation: he perished a victim of violence and ...”

“... generic) mode of the first-person pronoun. It is hard to read almost anything written by Ronald Syme, for example, from The Roman Revolution to History in Ovid, without recognising its intensely personal and sometimes political charge; the same could also be said of Finley on slavery or democracy, of Geoffrey de Ste Croix on The Class Struggle ...”

“... frequent addresses to Augustus pleading for permission to return, and it took the acuity of Ronald Syme in History in Ovid (1978) to perceive the self-assertion and protest behind the screen. Ovid knew that in Augustus he was dealing with a reader paranoid enough to beat any postmodern advocate of a hermeneutics of suspicion, but cumulatively over ...”

“... that were underway, it was the time that Roman history was being rethought (and repoliticised) by Ronald Syme, whose famous Roman Revolution appeared in 1939. For all the engaging enthusiasm of the book, two important questions about Collingwood’s achievements and his academic profile remain only half convincingly answered. First, how important is The ...”

“... an unknown author (or authors, with false names), compiled in the fourth century, perhaps. In 1980 Ronald Syme in the London Review denounced it as a hoax. There is a Penguin translation by Anthony Birley, called Lives of the Later Caesars. To dip into it is rather like finding old newspapers under the lino, from 1956 or 1968, say, with time-serving ...”

“... letters with a degree of suspicion. Radice and Dunn tend towards a more generous interpretation; Ronald Syme was more sceptical, as was the late Rex Winsbury in his 2013 biography. As a schoolboy I was determined to read between the lines, distrusting everything Pliny said, congratulating myself on being able to see through him. But now I wonder if he ...”

“... that was made secure by New Deal investment in their hometown, Wichita Falls. Greatly impressed by Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton in Selznick’s Tale of Two Cities, on whom he began to model himself, Williams at 15 was the subject of a feature in the local paper: ‘No other student even approaches him in the number of books read.’ When not absorbed in Look ...”

“... with a work written in the heyday of European appropriation of the symbolism of Roman power, Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution, a classic since its first publication in 1939. In Syme’s gripping and seductive treatment of Augustus’ establishment of a hereditary monarchy in Rome in all but name, the use of ...”