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The Satyricon
The Satyricon is another Roman novel, this one written in the first century, by Petronius, who was the emperor Nero’s arbiter of good taste. Which, to be honest, sounds like the ultimate nightmare job, and Petronius was forced to commit suicide in 66 AD. The Satyricon is not complete. We have maybe a fifth of…
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Perils of Japan
We had an earthquake about an hour ago. Level 3 on the Japanese scale, here, which means that the windows rattled quite decisively and a couple of books fell over, but no real damage. It was magnitude 4.6, according to the current reports, and the epicentre was quite some way north of here. There was…
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The Golden Ass
The Golden Ass is the only novel from classical antiquity to survive complete. It was written in the late second century by one Apuleius, and deals with the tragi-comic misadventures of a man who has been turned into a donkey as a result of a little too much interest in magic. It also includes the…
My Old Pages
These are links to my old webpages, from back before I moved to a wordpress-powered blog. Back when I wrote the HTML by hand in a text editor. Yes, really. The formatting on some of the pages has broken a bit, and there are newer versions of some of the content in the current part of the site. Nothing here is maintained, nor likely to have anything done with it in the future.