Robin Osborne

Interview of Robin Osborne by Alan Macfarlane 11th August 2022

0:00 Born in Colchester, Essex, in 1957 and grew up in a small village called Little Bromley to the East of Colchester; the village was tiny and I went to the village school which had just two classes, an infant class and a junior class; I had the very good fortune to be at the school in the period when the Headmaster of the school was somebody who realised that if he wanted to be the headmaster of a large school he should first be the headmaster of a small school and doing it well; so they came and transformed this village school & then moved on; his name was Hugh Heffer; he was the junior teacher and the infant teacher was a ferocious woman, Miss O'Brien; I can remember them very vividly

1:29:21 I can go back to my grandparents on both sides of the family; my father's grandfather was a farmer at Stoke Nayland in Suffolk; he had two daughters and when he got too old for farming he settled his daughters and gave them the choice of what they should have as their dowry; one daughter chose a farm and the other, my own grandmother chose a village shop; she took over the village shop in Little Bromley; she married somewhat beneath her station, my grandfather, whom I remember largely because in his retirement he made pin money by mending boxes for the local farmer, for apples and so on; I would stand for hours in the shed where he did this, watching him alternately hitting staples and his thumb; they lived in a small semi-detached house; my grandfather made his daily visit to the village pub where he had a standing order, so when he walked in the door they pulled him two pints, one he drank at the bar & the other he took to a table and sat down; that was his life; on my mother's side my grandmother came from a very large family; she had in fact served as a nurse in France in the First World War, having lied about her age, and that was in some ways the high point of her career; she then married, had two children, her husband died while the children were very young, and she had to go into service and cleaned other peoples houses for the rest of her life in order to bring up her children

4:26:13 Both my parents are now dead but lived into their late eighties, early nineties; my father grew up in the same village where I grew up, as the son of the shopkeeper; he was a clever man and went to Colchester Royal Grammar School; he was born in 1924 so in 1939 he was fifteen and what seemed most interesting for him was taking part in the War; he actually failed his school Cert. , which was a ridiculous thing for him to have done, but then went into the Royal Air Force after spending a year or two working in the local factory, in their laboratories, and that is where returned to after the War; one of the things he acquired while in the Air Force was an ability to place people on the basis of their accents and dialect at which he had an uncanny skill; he would listen to someone on the television or radio and say “just north of Leeds”, for example, and when one could try to find if he were right or not, he was invariably spot-on; he had various gifts which he took nowhere, but he had quite a gift with people; having started as a lab assistant he worked up to being the manager of a polystyrene plant; the factory then sold off its polystyrene manufacturing and he moved over to being a transport manager which enabled him to enjoy his love of cars and vehicles; so he had this managerial role all through my childhood

7:03:05 Both my parents very much encouraged my elder brother and myself in academic things; when at home we were encouraged never to be idle, and I think probably that is what I most learnt from my father; he was always doing something; he had a garage workshop; in probably 1962 when I was five he acquired at 1928 Rolls Royce that had belonged to the local Vicar who had traded it in for a Mini; this sat in the garage waiting for him to do it up for many years; he fairly rapidly did everything mechanical that was needed because that is what he was interested in, and then it sat there waiting for him to do the upholstery which he never did until I left home; eventually he did & got the whole thing out; he always had something on the go of that sort.

8:36:09 My mother had gone to the Girls High School in Colchester and had passed her school Cert., and had then gone to work as a lab assistant in the same place as my father – Lawford Place was what it was called, and it was the research bit – a firm that went through various titles but BX Plastics when I first knew it as a young boy; that is where they met and she never took employment after marrying, and she too was never idle; she had considerable artistic skills which came out in needlework and all sorts of things around the house.

9:45:00 Neither of them were driven on by any sort of Calvinist views, but my mother having been brought up I think going to the local Methodist church in Mile End, Colchester; then on moving she went to the village church; my father's grandfather had been church-warden there for many years and was also it's organist; this was a very small village so the congregation at the church was very small, and my mother rapidly fell out with one of ladies over some ridiculous argument; though she continued to get on with the local Rector whose visits I remember as fairly regular from my youth, and who was an influence upon me; she transferred her allegiance to the local Methodist Chapel so as a young boy I was taken there and sat through innumerable long sermons.

11:35:21 On my first memory, this is complicated because whether one remembers things because there is a photograph of it, or in my case I am not sure whether I really remember my paternal grandfather bouncing me up and down on his knee while he sang, or whether I can only remember the tape-recording made at the Christmas party when that happened, but that is one of my early memories; I was probably three at that point; he was not a serious singer but had a repertoire of two or three songs which he could be persuaded to sing to small children; otherwise I think my earliest memories are probably of holidays; we had a fairly regular pattern where we would go away for a week at Whitsun and then a week in the Summer; the earliest one I remember is probably going to Hastings in 1964 and then the Lake District in 1965

13:17:02 On hobbies, I did collect stamps but my brother was far more serious about it; I did it because that was supposed to be what you do; I was brought up in a bungalow but we had an orchard attached so quite a lot of time was spent helping to rake up grass after my father had cut it, and those sorts of things; it was a pretty open-air childhood

14:14:15 I took the 11+ and went to Colchester Royal Grammar School and I had a really wonderful education there; looking back at it I think probably the 1960s, early 1970s, were virtually the heyday for that school in terms of the quality of it’s teaching because there were a large number of teachers whom I now realize, had they been ten years younger would have ended up being employed as university lecturers in the newly-opened universities in the 1960s; but they were too old when they were looking for jobs, and school-teaching was all there was, and Colchester Grammar School was a good school and Colchester a pleasant place to live; I was taught by some really wonderful people; my first year I had as my form-master a man called George Arthurson who taught French; rumours had it that he had been part of the resistance during the Second World War; I suspect that was not true but that is what the pupils liked to believe about him; he never married, he lived with his sister, and he was known as “Auntie” because he would invite his pupils back for tea on a Friday afternoon, where you got coddled eggs cooked by his sister; this was eye-opening to somebody who actually had not spent any time visiting anybody who wasn’t a relative up to that point; his French teaching technique was to start off teaching us all a La Fontaine Fable, so we went straight into French and were expected to parrot it back; he was an inspiring teacher and he took a real interest; I think I was taught by him only in my first year and then perhaps two years later, but for years afterwards he would send me almost illegible postcards from his summer holidays in France; he must have done this to fifty or hundreds of students; so he was one very vivid presence though whether I can trace his intellectual influence, I am not quite sure; my ability with language to a certain extent would have come from him; it probably came much more heavily I think from my Classics teachers where I had a series of very good teachers, and one extraordinary man, Arthur Brown, who was Head of Classics, had done Greats in Oxford in the 1930s,was a man of very strong left-wing convictions which probably also had some influence on me, and whose ability to not only master the language but actually remember all sorts of historical details from the ancient world, and who also thought that it was important that one knew about the art as well as the literature; all of those aspects of his teaching had an enormous impact; he was a very gentle teacher except occasionally he would just lose it with naughty boys in the back of the class; for that reason he was known as “bomber Brown”; he had spent his war I believe bombing mosquitoes in Africa with DDT; that had been his part in the war effort; he retired from the school the year I left, after my ‘A’ levels; we had always assumed that he had been in his sixties all the time we were there, but he must have been just sixty when he took early retirement; the University of Essex took him on in the Sociology Department as they did not have a History Department at that point, in order to direct a Centre in Local History; I think he was employed a third time so he didn’t have to retire for another twenty-five years; I went to his retirement conference when he finally did retire aged eighty-five; I’d kept up with him up to that point; he was somebody who had an annual Christmas Eve party, and from the time I was in the sixth form one would get an invitation, and all his ex-pupils knew that on Christmas Eve they just turned up at Arthur’s house in Lexden, and there would be food and drink and interesting company, and so they did and it got more interesting all the time

20:35:11 I am quite proud that in my first year at the Grammar school I was the best scoring mathematician in the school, but that was my high point in maths; I was a perfectly adequate mathematician after that but my older brother was much better than I was; certainly by the time I did ‘O’ levels my enthusiasms were much more on the literature, history side; one of the amazing things looking back on it that the school did was to decide that English literature ‘O’ level was really pathetic and not worth entering boys for, so the school would simply self-certificate achievement in English literature; I don’t think they did this for very long, either from my year or the year above me, but we were all required to come up with some project or other; I didn’t know what to do but one of my close friends decided to do something on T.S. Eliot, so I decided to do Ezra Pound; my own English teacher said he knew nothing about Pound but Chris Barlow, one of the other teacher did; I went to see Barlow and he brought in all his books on Pound and lent them to me, and I spent ridiculous amounts of time in my ‘O’ level year reading all about him, and writing a mini-dissertation on aspects of Pound’s “Cantos”; so I was firmly headed in the arts direction; in the end, Arthur Brown had a very firm line about the value of Classics – do Latin and Greek and you could do anything after that, and that is the line that convinced all the brightest boys in the school, that they should take up Greek rather than Spanish or German; we had the possibility of another language in the third year, and it made no sense not to continue with Greek and Latin if you were going to do either of them; in the end I also did Ancient history, partly attracted by the fact that Arthur and the other teacher who had the greatest influence on me, a man called Terence Doherty who was Head of Biology, had discovered that there was some way of doing an ‘A’ level which was half Ancient history and half history of art; Arthur taught the Ancient history, but in my case as I was the only one doing it he sent me off to the library with a reading list and some essay titles, and Terence Doherty taught the history of art; he was a man who had come to the school I think when I was in the third year as head of biology; big black bushy beard, riding a Lambretta scooter, very outgoing, walked round the school gardens with the school boa constrictor round his neck during the summer so that the boa constrictor could enjoy the sun; he hadn’t taught me biology so I didn’t really know him at all except as an eccentric, until he taught me in the sixth form; he was totally passionate about the history of art; he also worked with Michael Ayrton – Terence lived in Colne Engaine and when he moved to the Colne Valley he had made contact with Ayrton, who was by that stage getting too weak to do his own casting, so Terence went along and helped him do it; when in due course I came to visit Terence at home, there was an Ayrton Pythia sitting on the corner of the kitchen table; Terry himself was a very considerable artist and he liked painting copies of things, so his cottage was full of impressionist, post-impressionist paintings copied by him; his teaching technique was simply to show one a large number of slides and the next week there would be a test on them; that’s where I received training in visual memory I think, and when half term came he would take all those who were doing the subject, some half a dozen of us, down by train to see exhibitions in London, and have lunch at the British Museum tavern; again, I gained an enormous amount from that

26:29:13 I was useless at sport; having been to a primary school where there were three people in my year, team sports were not really something that the school could do, so I had no experience of playing any team sport; I can run so I ran cross-country; largely stamina rather than speed was my strength, so I ended up as Captain of the cross-country team, and we were quite a successful school team; I was not anti-sport so I captained the 3rd eleven at cricket and I was Secretary to the rugby team which involved going to all their fixtures and running up and down as the touch judge; but that was the limit of my sporting prowess; drama played almost no part; I took part in one school play, “Richard III”, in a minor role; I played the corpse when we put on a bit of Aristophanes' “Frogs” for a Greek day at another school, but that was about it; music – I learnt piano from about the age of five, and I continued with piano lessons till the age of eighteen; I worked my way through all the grades and ended up passing grade 8, but like many pianists who are not particularly gifted one discovers that the world is full of people really are gifted, so although I have played off and on since for my own pleasure, I was never a good-enough pianist to play any sort of performing role; music links me with religion, so I think there is quite a lot of English Hymnody which is quite deeply sunk within me, and I find phrases from hymns good to think with in a variety of contexts; otherwise music does not play a tremendous part; I attend concerts from time to time; for preference I would listen to classical music

29:47:07 On religion, the attractions of Methodism seemed to me to be rather limited and that I think was largely the fact that the Methodist Chapel operated with a circuit of local preachers, many of whom were academically not very high-powered; one of two were; there was a wonderful man called Frank Peck, I remember, who was simply a farm worker from the next village, whose favourite Biblical book was the Book of Job, and on the Book of Job he was just wonderful; it’s a great sadness in a way that there was no Macfarlane out there capturing these effectively self-educated men; the man who was Rector of the local parish when I was a young boy I didn’t have much to do with, but on some major feasts we would go along to the Parish church; he was a very clever man; I remember going to a Good Friday service at the Parish church where we were part of the congregation of about five persons, something like that, but he preached nevertheless; I suppose I was twelve or thirteen, and he knew I had gone to the Grammar School and been studying Latin, and suddenly in the middle of the sermon having mentioned “death as the gateway of life”, turned to me and repeated it in Latin. I wasn’t without an interest in religion but I couldn’t see anywhere in Methodism that was going to satisfy or answer any of my questions; I was Confirmed, but only after coming to Cambridge

33:08:19 My relationship with religion after that was essentially a much-repeated pathway where you start in the middle, or low in Church terms, and gradually move up; so I have certainly gravitated to formal worship which had much greater attractions for me than informal worship; to some extent the greater degree of formality, the greater the attraction; in King’s I attended the Chapel when Michael Till was Dean, and my girlfriend, who became my first wife, Catherine Rowett, had a High Church background and so when Chapel wasn’t operating would drag me along to Little St Mary’s Church here, and it became my habitual place of worship; so I became a “bells and smells” person; I suppose if I were to justify my high-churchmanship it would be about powers of transformation, that a God who is active in the world has powers to change things; what the centring of High Church worship upon the Mass does is to put that moment of transformation absolutely central to the possibility that what has been made in one form can be turned into something else; I guess that that is the possibility that I grab onto in all circumstances; I am an optimist and think it is possible for all things to be changed, made better; there is a way, seeing one’s way through what may be just routine into something that isn’t routine
35:54:01 The difference between Protestantism and Catholicism is extremely blurred across the whole of the High Church; that is the line that, having worked on ancient religion as well, and on attempts from antiquity onwards to draw the line between magic and religion, that is a line where repeatedly people think it ought to be possible to make a clear distinction and stand on one side of that, and it just isn’t; the material world and the non-material world are inevitably connected; one experiences that in one’s own life, the psycho-somatic is a reality as it were, and I am quite comfortable with that blurry line; I don’t want to go too far over the blurry line, the casting of spells, the attempt to do things by forms of words is at all a sensible way of thinking about how the world operates, but I do think that trying to keep that line sharp is also more or less impossible

37:59:04 On Greek religion – I think one has to think that one can get somewhere, otherwise if I thought I couldn’t get anywhere towards understanding Greek religion what would I be spending my time working on it for; I suppose I am a sceptic about being able to draw strong lines, but I am a sceptic about where the difference between my being able to understand your religious experience and my being able to understand the religious experience of the Greeks is actually a significant difference; the sorts of evidence I have available for your religious experience are very much like the religious experience for at least some Greeks; hence, in as far as we can understand anyone else’s religious experience, I think that there is no reason to think that the fact that they are from another culture is going to make it impossible for us to see the world like that; you have to work a lot harder; lots of things I can take for granted about you, possibly incorrectly, but there is very little one can take for granted of those who come from another culture; I have a pretty strong commitment to the historian immersing themselves in the material as well as the literary and sub-literary culture of other people, and that takes one a long way

41:07:00 All my classics teachers at school were from Oxford, and Oxford Greats were really what you should do if you were a classicist as far as they were concerned; they were not however hostile to my coming to Cambridge; there was a closed Cambridge Exhibition at Corpus, for instance, so there had been a sequence of Colchester Royal Grammar boys going there; I had decided at some point during the Sixth form, before I applied to university, that I really wanted to combine classics and the history of art; there was no history of art in Oxford as an undergraduate degree; it obviously existed in Cambridge if only as a Part 2, but that was ideal for me as I could do classics and then change subject; so that was the primary motivation for preferring Cambridge; my UCAS entry to university had been schizophrenic so number 1 had been Cambridge classics, number 2 had been Courtauld Institute history of art, number 3 somewhere else for classics, number 4 Sussex history of art; my Headmaster regarded himself as having a hot-line to Trinity, Cambridge so I was detailed off to go and see the Director of Studies in classics there, a man called John Easterling who ended up being University Draftsman – a lovely man, and totally grey; I saw him and we had a pleasant chat, without being tremendously excited by the experience; my Head of Classics said that actually the person I should talk to if I wanted to do history of art in Part 2 was Caroline Elam, the daughter of a former Headmaster of Colchester Grammar School, John Elam, and she was a Research Fellow at King’s at that point – she must have been one of the first female Research Fellows here; I arranged to see her and to see Geoffrey Lloyd on the way; I was late because the train from Ipswich had been cancelled, and I don’t know whether it was just that Geoffrey was impatient or whether he was going to do this anyway, but he simply took me into lunch; on the way he bought me a pint in the bar, unthinkable these days and possibly just because he had just stopped being Senior Tutor and he liked the fact that everybody in College knew him, and the bar maximised the number of people he could say “hi” to or would say the same to him as he went through; anyway, Geoffrey was a totally different sort of academic from John Easterling and it was obvious on first meeting that here was someone who was lively and interested; I went on to see Caroline Elam and it was obvious then that I should put King’s as my first choice; I then had the slightly bizarre experience that the other thing that my school Headmaster was keen on getting was people with early offers; so one was interviewed in September and some got offers while others had to wait until December; I received an early offer which was wonderful; I then did the scholarship exam – of course, all that was at stake was £60 a year which even then wasn’t very much – but nevertheless I got myself a scholarship, a nice thing to arrive with; I came up in 1976

46:00:11 I was part of an extraordinarily large Classics year, probably the largest Classics year of thirteen, three men and ten women; under the arrangements that prevailed then, King’s didn’t give awards to women so as not to poach them from the women-only colleges; all three men had awards and it quickly became obvious that all the ten women would have had awards as well if it were possible – it was a very high-quality year in all sorts of ways, and full of interesting characters; this was also the moment when John Henderson had just arrived – he arrived in 1975 or January 1976 – so we got John at his earliest and that was an amazing experience being taught by him, as in a different way was the experience of being taught by Geoffrey; their techniques were completely different; Geoffrey drove us all through our work by the sort of moral pressure; he would give us a sheet with some possible essay questions and set us up to have a class one week and then to write an essay the next, but he’d make it clear that perhaps one ought to do two essays for the next week, but if one really could one should do three; he had inherited from Patrick Wilkinson, and perhaps even further back, a practice when we arrived we were given a printed sheet which at the top said Greek Authors, listed in two columns, then Latin Authors on the bottom half of the page; you then filled it in with what you had already read, and at the beginning and end of term you took it along and Geoffrey wanted to know what you had added, and then gave you a list of what you ought to add; on that list a line would be drawn and he’d write – have you read Popper? Have you read Dante’s “Inferno”? – and you acquired a list of further items which any well-educated person ought to know that were not directly relevant; then again the sort of moral pressure was that you sat down and read these; that worked with me and I read an enormous amount as an undergraduate; my education was rounded out, as it were, by Geoffrey in a very effective way; the experience of being taught by John was quite different; with Geoffrey you could understand what he was asking if one didn’t know what the answer was; with John you were never quite sure where he was leading; some of his comments that stuck in the mind, or even on essays, it was only years later that I realized what he was getting at; I think what I probably learnt from John was what the questions are to ask; in some sense it wasn’t the answers that mattered, it was coming to see that those were the questions one needed to think about, and often to see that these were questions that you couldn’t answer; those were the big influences certainly in the first two years; as I said, I had been due to change to the history of art, which I never did, partly because one of Terence Doherty’s great qualities as a teacher had been to bring in what he himself had been reading and he kept himself pretty well up to date on what was appearing; so I read T.J. Clark The Absolute Bourgeois and so on while still at school, and was very much attracted by the sort of thick cultural history approach to the history of art, only to quickly discover that actually that was not what the history of art was as taught in Cambridge at that point; in any case I had got too enmeshed in Classics so I simply carried on with it into my third year, at which point I was taught by Peter Garnsey at Jesus, and with Peter there was a sort of rigour; he was famous for an approach in which he said to the student, “You have read this more recently that I have. You tell me what it is about”; I took a course on Roman Italy which he supervised me for, and we read some pretty obscure texts, and after the first supervision you never went back unable to engage in detail with those texts; that was a tremendous education and Peter then & since has been an inspiration as an Ancient Historian for me

53:33:00 I did a Ph.D.; in my final year as an undergraduate I had done this paper on Roman Italy which was about Rome and its relationship with the rest of Italy in the late Republic; I had done a paper on Athens in the late 5th Century and early 4th Century which was taught by Moses Finley in his final year, and by Elizabeth Rawson, and I’d also done a paper on Roman Britain which was an archaeology paper; rather bizarrely in that year as someone else was on Sabbatical, was taught by Paul Halstead who was a King’s Research Fellow and a Neolithic archaeologist of Greece, not a Romano-British specialist at all, and by a man called Tony Spawforth who was a historian of Roman Greece who was temporarily out of employment, and was brought in specially to teach this even though it wasn’t his topic; what that did was to get me interested in a topic that it was hardly surprising I was interested in as a village boy, which was relations between town and country; it seemed to me that nobody had thought enough about how classical Athens worked and how the country and town interacted; City States were always thought of a cities with a little bit of territory round them, but actually classical Attica is the size of an English county, there is an awful lot outside the relatively small classical town of Athens; I knew that I wanted to do that, thinking about the archaeology as well as the history; I had thought that I ought to move and do my doctorate elsewhere and went and saw the relevant people in Oxford, only to discover that the relevant people, particularly on the archaeology side weren’t really interested in these sorts of questions; I came back and asked Anthony Snodgrass, who didn’t work on the classical period at all but who had arrived more or less when I arrived as an undergraduate, as Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology, and who was doing some very interesting work where he was trying to turn patterns within the material evidence into ways of thinking about the society; he was happy to supervise me so I had a very productive doctoral relationship with him where he actively took benevolent oversight, and made sure that my sort of quantitative archaeology was up to snuff which was particularly what turned Anthony on; I was fortunate then to get a Junior Research Fellowship here in a bizarre year when the internal competition elected only two people, and those two were both classicists, Simon Goldhill being the other one

57:11:22 On administrative roles in the College alongside academic work; I do both by always being busy; it’s not that I am someone who doesn’t sleep at all, I’m not a Margaret Thatcher, but I do just keep at it; I also find it often makes things more, not less, efficient to be doing more than one thing at once; the administrative things I often find just fit into the bits of the day when your brain is too dead to do any original thought; it’s a matter of having things to do that will fill the suitable spaces that crop up; one of the things that people sometimes find is that I don’t hang about very much waiting for things to happen; probably I should do more of that, but if a meeting's finished it’s finished, and one goes off to do something else; I am conscious that I am more productive in the morning than I am later in the day; there is a natural rhythm whereby marking undergraduate essays tends to happen in the evening when they hand them in, and I do get slightly annoyed when they hand them in so late that you have to spend valuable morning time marking student essays; other than that I don’t really police the organisation

59:36:02 On the creative writing side, I noticed that when you interviewed someone else they said their writing was illegible so at an early stage they learnt to type; that is my story; I am left-handed, my writing has always been terrible; I learnt to type at an early stage some essays when I was an undergraduate, and I learnt to touch-type properly; I then used typewriters so much that I got into being able to write on a typewriter and I’ve transferred that to a word-processor; there was a time when I was writing my own dissertation where because I needed to use Greek I had to use the typewriter in the old museum of Classical Archaeology which enabled one to do that - my mornings writing up footnotes on an old typewriter in the museum, my afternoons using the good typewriter there as the Secretary wasn’t using it then, and then my evenings typing out my wife’s dissertation because she at that stage didn’t type and I did; that was a point at which there was a very clear division of the day, but that was only a brief phase; for many years I have done almost everything straight on the word-processor; I sometimes use some hand-written notes but usually not; usually it comes out fairly clean; I am much keener on questions than answers so I do regularly embark on things where I know what the question is but not the answer; there are some times, which happen less often than it used to, when one discovers one’s intuition to what the answer is, is totally wrong; there was an occasion now many years ago, where I wrote an abstract for a conference paper in which I said I was going to argue one thing; I then did the research properly and realized exactly the reverse was true, and I delivered the paper arguing exactly the reverse and there was only one person who noticed, as I say that doesn’t often happen but when it does you can find yourself having set something up in some way, and that isn’t the appropriate way; you go back and you re-write

1:02:51:00 It is not easy to pick out books or articles I would like to be remembered for; I lost myself a job by my answer to that question back in the 1980s when I was asked in an interview here for a lectureship, what piece of work I was proudest of; I said it was an article I had just written on the Parthenon Frieze and the way in which the frieze was visible through the colonnade; although you go to the British Museum and see a long stretch of frieze, actually on the building itself you never see a long stretch; you saw a little excerpts and in order to see it you yourself had to process, and there was a relationship between the two; this was a piece which had sort of developed in teaching; I remember coming into lunch in King’s one day and talking about this to John Simon, and John himself getting very excited, and that conversation really helping to formulate what I was writing; it came out as a piece called ‘The Viewing and Obscuring the Parthenon Frieze’, and I’m still very proud of it and it would be one of my top hits; someone mentioned it to me about a month ago so I know there are people out there who do think this is one of the pieces where I have contributed significantly; Keith Hopkins was one of those interviewing me on that occasion; Keith’s view afterwards was that I had to talk about my major work, it couldn’t be just an article on the side, but had to be what I was mainly working on which was on town and country relations, and turning the thesis into a book; that may well have been Keith covering up for all sorts of other reasons, a convenient way of explaining to me why I hadn’t got the job; I regard that loss as extremely fortunate as I went off to Oxford for a time and a wonderful education from my colleagues there

1:06:11:00 A second piece I will pick out from the same period as a research fellow, an extremely fruitful period; I shall pick this out despite the fact that that you feature in this, Alan; when I’d finished writing the dissertation I thought I ought to get some articles out alongside the book, and also that I ought to also make sure that I engaged with some sort of topics which were not yet more town-country relations; I got interested in who prosecuted whom and for what in Classical Athens, which I think is the title I used when I gave it first as a seminar paper; so looking at patterns of prosecution, relations between those who were prosecuting when one knows a bit more about them; this turned into paper in The Journal of Hellenic Studies called ‘Law in action in Classical Athens’; I remember coming into dinner and sitting next to you, and in the way King’s Fellows have, particularly Research Fellows, but perhaps other Fellows as well, your basic question to me was what are you working on; this was probably in 1984 and you were extremely helpful on the anthropological background; I think that I’d probably already got as far as the Tiv because everybody gets as far as the Tiv if they work on those sorts of questions; but you engaged with what I was asking, you helped me refine the ideas and see what the important things were; that too became quite a controversial article in some ways; so the world of those who work on Greek Law is basically divided between those who believe me and those who think this is completely mistaken in terms of the thesis that I argue; that was a piece that in the way that happens with one’s academic reputation, it got me a name as someone who worked in law; so I had a name as someone who worked in town and country relations and someone who worked in law; the Parthenon frieze piece gave me a name for someone who worked on sculpture, and essentially for many years I wrote almost nothing that wasn’t a result of invitations which tended to come out of those three areas; that would be some pieces earlier in my career I’m proud of

1:09:14:09 I’m also pretty proud of my last book, which took me twenty years to write; it started off as a project that was devised for an application for a British Academy Readership in the days when the British Academy would pay one for two years to do a research project in mid-career; it was a project on Athenian vase painting taking advantage of the very large corpus of the surviving classical Athenian vases to think, not about artist’s hands which is what had dominated the study of vase painting, certainly until the 1970s, but thinking about subject matter and how the choice of subjects and the way that subjects are portrayed on vases might change over time, within a relatively limited window from the late sixth century to the middle of the fifth century, which is a time we knew lots was changing in Athens; it’s the time of the invention of democracy with Cleisthenes, the Persian wars sit in the middle of that period, there has long been an artistic revolution called the Greek Revolution that takes place in this period and been much discussed; I wanted to see how the choice of what was shown would change over time and how that might relate to that was going on; so I sat in the archive of photos of Athenian vases in Oxford for two years with my pile of reference cards in the old-fashioned way, classifying them not by painter but by subject; I now can’t quite recover what my initial expectations about what I might find would be; I must have put some hypothesis into the application to the British Academy, but what I did discover was that what changes is not that particular sorts of activities become more or less popular so much as the approach showing activities changed from late sixth century to very early fifth century, with interest in action, competition, to some extent individualism, to mid-fifth century concentration where there is no action; so athletes stop throwing their javelins, stop running, and you just find them standing about in the gym with their strigils doing their aprés-gym stuff; soldiers similarly stop fighting, they stop taking their armour out of their wrappers, and instead they stand pouring a libation with some female member of their family; so there is a whole sort of sea change in what the artists are interested in where they move from exteriority to interiority, and what we are familiar with from classical sculpture which is that classical sculpture sends you to thinking about what is happening in people’s heads not about the actions they are engaged in; it can be seen across the whole of Athenian painted pottery, and that, although in some ways it is not a surprising finding, perfectly fits with other things we know, is something that other people haven’t observed or documented in the same sort of way; so that too I would pick out as something which I hope at least is going to prove the foundation for other people doing interesting research

1:13:47:24 As I’ve intimated I regard the sandwich of my life between Cambridge and Oxford has been entirely positive from my point of view; I moved to an Oxford where the Classics and perhaps Ancient History in particular were in a golden phase as I now realize, dominated by some really interesting figures who were at the height of their powers, and moved from what is a large faculty by international standards, to a much larger faculty in Oxford where there was much more expertise on hand, and just tremendous encouragement to get involved and do things, and a very positive reception across the piste; also to this really interesting, different attitude within Oxford where teaching really does dominate life, or did in late eighties and nineties which I can talk about, largely because people were having to do a lot of it in terms of tutorials, and research very much pushed on to the back-burner and not really talked about, whereas in Cambridge, particularly as a Research Fellow, one was on one’s toes all the time talking about one’s research; the concentration of energy was put in a different place in Oxford; ironically it was also a place which gave me tremendous opportunities which I haven’t had as a University teaching officer in Cambridge because of the way in which in Oxford you have this large obligation to your college but you have a very light obligation in terms of lectures; I was only obliged to do sixteen lectures a year under the contract, and that meant that if someone came along and said would you like to do an additional lecture here or there, or even would you like to do an addition course, you could say yes, in a way that people who are doing forty of forty-eight lectures, as people do here, would think twice before adding to that; halfway through my Oxford career a group of female colleagues launched Master of Studies in Women’s Studies and one of my Classical colleagues drew my attention to this, and I simply sent a postcard in the way that one used to, to say if you are doing this I am quite interested in the visual side; they latched onto this and I became the Secretary to the Women’s Studies Committee, the only man, a nice bit of role-reversal, and then they gave me the opportunity to teach things which massively expanded my experience and so on, and I had a tremendously rich intellectual experience in that way; so the different ways in which the two systems worked have for me complemented each other wonderfully, and to my mind I enjoyed the best of them at each career stage; I wouldn’t be here today if I had been an undergraduate in Oxford, but I wouldn’t have done what I have done in the last twenty years if I hadn’t had the spell in Oxford itself.