O well…your clients can sleep easy at night…there’s not much you won’t be prepared to do.
Ends and means and all that…
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I know la Cappella Sistina was a huge player in one of @cynicaloldgit’s poll threads…
Anyways, I was reminiscing the other day about my former life as a postgrad and dug out this old gem.
What Professor William Wallace doesn’t know about Michelangelo’s contribution to the Sistine Chapel isn’t worth knowing. I’m always in awe when someone gives a paper/lecture off the top of their head.
I was at this lecture, one of the best I’ve ever been to, the gentleman who gave the intro was my PhD supervisor. If you have an hour I would highly recommend it. Apologies in advance, the video did not pick up his slides.
(And if you’re ever in Florence you could do much worse than head 20km up the road to Prato for a mooch around)
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Apparently, the appeals process takes a long time in Scotland. But here’s a really scary sentence from the article.
“Despite the United Nations last year passing a resolution calling for an end to witch trials, they are continuing in some parts of the world, from Nigeria and Tanzania, to India and Papua New Guinea.”
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We’re not allowed to question such practices, because it’s their ‘culture’.
Bee in your bonnet about something?
Been reading this over the past couple of weeks. Fascinating stuff:
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If you’re interested in ancient history, you could do a lot worse than check out Meet the Romans with Mary Beard.
She is a giant in the field, she is charismatic, but it’s the social history that gets me with this one. So many docos are about the emperors, the rich guys, the generals…Beard has done them herself…
This series is a about the common people and is bloody great.
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She’s a great presenter. Always enjoy her programmes. 
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Another great watch is Michael Wood’s In Search of the Trojan War.
Wood never finished his postgraduate degree at Oxford, but his knowledge and feel for the material is top notch, in my opinion. He would have been a more than capable academic, I have no doubt.
The whole thing is on YouTube…direct from 1985…lol
Other than the pre-unification footage of Berlin, the thing I love about this one is the discussion of the beginnings of archaeology.
What’s that?
Dunno. Fuck it. Just dig the cunt up.
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Is it literally about Troy, is that used as a metaphor for archeology?
It’s him kicking around the Near East trying to ascertain if there is any historical basis for the Iliad.
So yeah, I guess it is.
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Can’t beat Prof Alice Roberts for latent sexual magmatism…unless you’re talking Prof Janina Ramirez of course - the acceptable Goth face of historical analysis 
Most unexpected turn in a thread since Hitler worked his way into the CL thread
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Wood does devote one episode to the bardic tradition, and there’s heaps of footage of a Celtic bard (who would be long dead by now) who was perhaps the last bloke who knew the old Celtic tales by heart.
Some academic at the time (1985) was scrambling to record them all before he died.
It’s all about the word patterns. Very interesting indeed, imo.
Is that something to do with volcanoes?
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Oh, yes 
I used to enjoy watching Michael Wood’s shows on tv. I always thought he was an academic - particularly after seeing him linked with Manchester Uni about a decade ago. Amazing.
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Both. I think up to around the time of Schliemann archaelogy was largely rich people going around doing little more than grave robbing. Schliemann himself was somewhat guilty of this, even to the extend of planting ‘finds’. Although his work in Turkey helped identify where Troy is believed to be, he cheated his partner who had made the initial discoveries and he destroyed some of the archaelogical evidence as he rushed to find the treasures. So layers from the different time periods are mixed up in some areas. Yet he has obviously had some influence on the field of archaeology that came after him.
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He still is Professor in Public History at Manchester, so I guess it was wrong of me to imply he’s not an academic, but it would have been his profile that got him that position, rather than his research.
I should have said, ‘academic in the traditional sense’.
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