Come and Get ’em

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

Self-styled Spartans storming the US Capitol, pro-Brexit Spartans in the House of Commons, Spartans on the silver screen (in the film 300), a Spartan warrior tattooed on the arm of Olympic breaststroker extraordinaire Adam Peaty: Spartans, Spartans everywhere, but not a drop of truth to be found, according to the author of this latest history […]

Out of Attica

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

When bubonic plague reached Constantinople in the spring of AD 542, carpenters downed tools, shops grew empty and people sat at home, ailing, caring or simply waiting. The Byzantine historian Procopius recorded that, during the four-month peak of the pandemic, between five thousand and ten thousand people were dying every day. Perhaps a quarter of […]

Freedom or Death!

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

The year 2021 was meant to be special for Greece: an opportunity to celebrate the bicentenary of the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821, which led to the birth of modern Greece. It was also supposed to be an occasion to mark the country’s slow and painful, yet also real and tangible, emergence from a vicious and protracted economic crisis that had brought it to its knees. The festivities were to be orchestrated by

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