Oliver Nicholson

The three best reasons for being an academic, as is well known, are June, July, and August. Especially on the occasions when the University of Minnesota conspires with the McKnight Foundation to allow one to spend those months reading and writing about a really genial poet for instance, a character from the Later Roman Empire … Read more

How I hate modern motor roads. Come let me count the ways. First there is the intimate shame of personal inadequateness. I know my reactions while driving are not swift enough to be safe at fifty-five miles per hour—in fact, they are unsafe at any speed, as my family says. All too often I will … Read more

Watching people in museums is often as absorbing as studying the displays. Some years ago, my old tutor was standing under the great sixth-century dome of the Holy Wisdom in Istanbul, lecturing to a rather tweedy group of English country gentry. His audience was starting to suffer from museum leg, when a pigeon detached itself … Read more

I have a colleague at the University of Minnesota who hates commencement. Marching in gowns and hoods to the boom of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” puts her in mind, she says, of the army. I hardly like to point out that most faculty marching would have its practitioners instantaneously in the guardroom were it ever … Read more

Home is where we start from. That’s why different things appear perfectly natural to different folk. For much of the Near East it is not democracy that is natural but the milet system of the old Ottoman Empire, where no one had votes, but each minority was responsible for itself under an Islamic umbrella. For … Read more

The other day I had lunch with a lawyer. “Do you like Tony Blair?” he asked, with the courtesy characteristic of his profession. I could give no sensible answer, as I have never had the honor of the prime minister’s acquaintance. My learned friend went on to wonder how an apparently intelligent and sensitive man … Read more

Odd how few poets emerged from the Second World War. The First World War produced plenty. Some, like Rupert Brooke, thought they were going to be Homeric heroes––he died without hearing a shot fired in anger, and is buried on the island of Scyrus, where Achilles hid among the women. Others—Charles Sorley, Wilfrid Owen, Siegfried … Read more

Wagner’s music, so they say, is not as bad as it sounds. I suppose the tunes aren’t too awful if you don’t mind being shouted at. But what makes me queasy is the overwhelming moral effect, the way it makes you limp and inert like a rabbit trapped in headlights. Other composers in the light … Read more

There are three golden things that never perish: gold, honey, and the sun. An archaeologist friend of mine once put this to the test. She was excavating at the Bronze Age citadel built at Mycenae during the Greek Civil War when her team came across a large jar full of honey. They agreed it would … Read more

Other countries’ politics are always a mystery. Of course, it helps to know some history. Then you can at least ask how they got here from there, rather than merely measure how different they are from us, how they fail to meet our highest standards of democracy, feminism, etc. But even disinterested interest is sometimes … Read more