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Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us
So much about the society that is now emerging in the twenty-first century bears an astonishing resemblance to the most prominent features of what we call the classical world - its institutions, its priorities, its entertainment, its physics, its sexual morality, its food, its politics, even its religion. The ways in which we live our rich and varied lives correspond - almost eerily so - to the ways in which the Greeks and Romans lived theirs. Whether we are eating and drinking, bathing or exercising or making love, pondering, admiring or enquiring, our habits of thought and action, our diversions and concentrations recreate theirs. It is as though the 1500 years after the fall of Rome had been time out from traditional ways of being human.
This eye-opening book makes us look afresh at who we are and how we got here. Full Circle is not only wonderfully witty and brilliantly astute, but also profound and often disquieting. Ferdinand Mount effortlessly peels back 2000 years of history to show how much we are like the ancients, how in ways both trivial and crucial we are them and they are us.
See an interesting Podcast of this book:
http://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/mul...
This eye-opening book makes us look afresh at who we are and how we got here. Full Circle is not only wonderfully witty and brilliantly astute, but also profound and often disquieting. Ferdinand Mount effortlessly peels back 2000 years of history to show how much we are like the ancients, how in ways both trivial and crucial we are them and they are us.
See an interesting Podcast of this book:
http://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/mul...
438 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
10 people are currently reading
169 people want to read
About the author
Ferdinand Mount
39 books33 followersFerdinand Mount was born in 1939. For many years he was a columnist at the Spectator and then the Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times. In between, he was head of the Downing Street Policy Unit and then editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He is now a prize-winning novelist and author of, most recently, the bestselling memoir Cold Cream. He lives in London.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
May 21, 2012
light, fluffy, some interesting trivia, a quaint approach, mildly interesting, worth the $5 at the cheap bookshop, not more
December 27, 2025
This book spends too long talking about modern Christianity. It seems to have been misrepresented by its title and blurb.
The first half of the book is decent. It looks at baths, the gym etc. and discusses the similarities between modern habits and ancient ones. It is fun to read and has some interesting facts. Then the second half of the book shifts to a weird political/religious tone.
The chapter on religion spends far too long serving as a way for the author to criticise the views of Richard Dawkins and other atheist authors, and not enough time looking at how ancient religion is present in modern society. I was expecting perhaps, a discussion of the value we place on the family home and the links to household gods or Hestia. You could talk about our days of the week and how the meanings we ascribe them are related to the Roman gods, how modern raves mimic ancient religious festivals…the possibilities are endless. But no, instead we are forced to read what comes across as a personal vendetta against atheism which barely even mentions the ancient world. Which would be fine if the book itself wasn’t supposed to be about how classical and modern things resemble one another. (Also, a small side note for the author: paganism and atheism are not the same thing and if you repeatedly conflate the two then you shouldn’t be writing a book about the classical world.) The concluding chapter ‘Scipio’s Dream’ also takes a weirdly religious angle. Why are we talking about Christian schools under a labour government when this has no link at all to the classical world?? Again, this chapter is an interesting look at the philosophy of religion, but this is not what the book is supposed to be about. The epilogue is also weirdly religious and is basically a little anecdote about how the author once accidentally took a piss on a makeshift holy shrine whilst on a countryside walk. An utterly charmless story which again is centred on modern Christianity and again has little or nothing to do with the premise of the book. I feel like I’ve been misled by the title and description and I probably wouldn’t have bought this book if I knew what it was actually going to be about.
Likewise, there are various problems with other chapters too. The chapter on science is a very interesting introduction to classical philosophy and breaks down the views of various pre-Socratic philosophers, but then doesn’t compare this at all to our modern mindsets and scientific practices. The chapter on New Age includes little digs at Edward Said and the repeated condensing of the ancient Eastern world into a single ‘oriental.’ The chapter on Nature takes what I consider to be a dismissive tone when discussing global warming. The book as a whole also leans too far into the concept of the so called ‘dark ages’ for my liking but I can’t really criticise this as in hindsight the so called premise of the book itself implies this would be the case.
Apart from these instances, the book itself is fine. Just fine. It offers a descriptive, rather than an argumentative or investigative, approach. As a whole it is easy to read and interesting enough but tainted by the weird religious sidetracking.
Ultimately this book missed the mark for me, probably cause I was expecting it to be something it wasn’t. To me, the whole premise of the book, a look at how we are in fact similar to our ancient ancestors, is not touched upon enough. The only saving grace is that I bought this book from an Amnesty bookshop so at least my money went to a good cause.
The first half of the book is decent. It looks at baths, the gym etc. and discusses the similarities between modern habits and ancient ones. It is fun to read and has some interesting facts. Then the second half of the book shifts to a weird political/religious tone.
The chapter on religion spends far too long serving as a way for the author to criticise the views of Richard Dawkins and other atheist authors, and not enough time looking at how ancient religion is present in modern society. I was expecting perhaps, a discussion of the value we place on the family home and the links to household gods or Hestia. You could talk about our days of the week and how the meanings we ascribe them are related to the Roman gods, how modern raves mimic ancient religious festivals…the possibilities are endless. But no, instead we are forced to read what comes across as a personal vendetta against atheism which barely even mentions the ancient world. Which would be fine if the book itself wasn’t supposed to be about how classical and modern things resemble one another. (Also, a small side note for the author: paganism and atheism are not the same thing and if you repeatedly conflate the two then you shouldn’t be writing a book about the classical world.) The concluding chapter ‘Scipio’s Dream’ also takes a weirdly religious angle. Why are we talking about Christian schools under a labour government when this has no link at all to the classical world?? Again, this chapter is an interesting look at the philosophy of religion, but this is not what the book is supposed to be about. The epilogue is also weirdly religious and is basically a little anecdote about how the author once accidentally took a piss on a makeshift holy shrine whilst on a countryside walk. An utterly charmless story which again is centred on modern Christianity and again has little or nothing to do with the premise of the book. I feel like I’ve been misled by the title and description and I probably wouldn’t have bought this book if I knew what it was actually going to be about.
Likewise, there are various problems with other chapters too. The chapter on science is a very interesting introduction to classical philosophy and breaks down the views of various pre-Socratic philosophers, but then doesn’t compare this at all to our modern mindsets and scientific practices. The chapter on New Age includes little digs at Edward Said and the repeated condensing of the ancient Eastern world into a single ‘oriental.’ The chapter on Nature takes what I consider to be a dismissive tone when discussing global warming. The book as a whole also leans too far into the concept of the so called ‘dark ages’ for my liking but I can’t really criticise this as in hindsight the so called premise of the book itself implies this would be the case.
Apart from these instances, the book itself is fine. Just fine. It offers a descriptive, rather than an argumentative or investigative, approach. As a whole it is easy to read and interesting enough but tainted by the weird religious sidetracking.
Ultimately this book missed the mark for me, probably cause I was expecting it to be something it wasn’t. To me, the whole premise of the book, a look at how we are in fact similar to our ancient ancestors, is not touched upon enough. The only saving grace is that I bought this book from an Amnesty bookshop so at least my money went to a good cause.
Want to read
May 2, 2011Philip Hensher's review of Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us
Ferdinand Mount Simon & Schuster, 256pp, £20
Unexpected parallels between our age and another are a staple of the jobbing journalist’s trade. Usually coinciding with a major exhibition at the Royal Academy, such arguments tend to claim that there are a surprising number of similarities between, say, the Byzantine Empire and the way we live now. Despite the fact that these arguments often result from a brain-storming session round the conference table, there is usually enough there to sustain a page or so. Human nature does not change so much, and some very unexpected idiosyncrasies recur at regular intervals.
Ferdinand Mount has set himself a rather more ambitious task, and his argument is more intricate than usual. He suggests that the characteristic fads of the classical world have, in recent decades, come back to us without our recognising the fact. The Greek and Roman love of pleasure, indulgence, fantasy and opulence are recapitulated in some of the most characteristic statements of our time. Jade Goody, the ‘spa experience’, Cherie Blair’s New Age entourage and Damien Hirst all have their ancient-world originals. There is nothing new under the sun.
Some of the parallels that Mount draws are startlingly close. An ancient foodie like Archestratus, in his snobbery and his geographical precision about where to get the best fish sounds exactly like a modern magazine writer on the subject: ‘When you come to Miletus, get from the Gaeson Marsh a kephalos-type grey mullet and a sea bass . . . that is where they are best.’ The ancient obsession with tales of exotically themed dinners was revived in the 19th century by Grimod de la Reynière’s famous funerary dinner, and J. K. Huysman’s Black Dinner. Such exotic themes at the dinner table continue to this day, courtesy of Heston Blumenthal, who has indeed cooked Roman dinners on television.
Mount has no trouble in drawing parallels between the immense contemporary ‘spa’ industry, devoted, in its hideous favourite word, to ‘pampering’, and the colossal baths of antiquity. We are at least as fascinated in the fatuous cult of athletic fitness as the ancients, and to much less obvious purpose. Mount casts a beady eye over the principal revivers of physical fitness in the modern age, the militarising Germans, and then wonders what it is all for:
There is little that seems ‘bold’ and ‘merry’ about our obsession with keeping in shape. On the contrary, it seems a somewhat timorous and joyless pastime, a sign of our fear of death rather than of our readiness to confront life.
He ventures, too, into the question of sex, and discovers that the rise, since the 1960s, of casual promiscuity — the ‘zipless fuck’, the expression ‘no strings attached’ — is much more like an aspect of the ancient mindset than we usually suspect. To the question ‘Do you fancy a shag?’
Theocritus or Catullus . . . would have been quite unmoved, and responded simply: ‘Your place or mine?’ For sex is as natural as eating and drinking. Why should anyone think twice about an invitation to a decent restaurant?
Not everything goes quite so convincingly into the parallel:
Just as there is scarcely a remote pueblo or hill village that is unaware of Mick Jagger, so Mithras was a familiar cult figure to soldiers and the local natives in places as far afield as Austria and Slovenia and Caernavon and Hadrian’s Wall.
And other points in his argument are not real parallels, though often amusingly explored. It is true that hardly anybody in the ancient world read silently; when St Augustine habitually did so, it was remarkable enough to be worth commenting on. Interesting as this is, I don’t think it can really be brought into comparison with the late unlamented Labour government’s apparent policy to make public libraries as noisy as possible: ‘Learning is not all about quiet contemplation. I want to see libraries full of life, rather than quiet and sombre. Attractive buildings exuding a sense of joy’, as Andy Burnham put it. He wasn’t talking about reading out loud: he was recommending meaningless yacking.
Nevertheless, some very unexpected comparisons turn out to bear fruit. The multiplicity of spiritual choices in the Roman Empire around the time of the Antonine emperors sounds very modern:
You could believe in anything or nothing. You could put your trust in astrologers, snake-charmers, prophets and diviners and magicians; you could take your pick between half a dozen creation myths and several varieties of resurrection.
In our contemporary, think-for-yourself, spiritual supermarket, heavily influenced by an increasingly multi-cultural mix, pretty well the same is true. Apart from (as far as I know) snake-charmers.
Even the most characteristic phenomenon of our times, the descent of random and undeserved celebrity, has an exact parallel. The Emperor Hadrian met and fell in love with an obscure farmer’s son from Bithynia on the Black Sea, Antinous; when he drowned in the Nile, Hadrian ordered an empire-wide cult of his lover, and thousands of images survive. There was nothing at all remarkable about Antinous, as far as we know, apart from his beauty, but that was enough. Antinous, who became a god, would have perfectly understood the careers of Kate Moss and Jade Goody.
These parallels between the ancient world and ours are intriguing. But perhaps the richest and most suggestive part of the argument comes when Mount addresses what came between; the huge stretch of time separating the ancients from us, when the beliefs and practices of society seem extraordinarily remote from our way of thinking. One of the main claims of this book is that we have become detached from the 1500 years of Christian thinking, and the culture which succeeded the Romans is now much more peculiar to us than they are.
Certainly, the Christian attitudes to sex, to food, to questions of the body such as washing and exercise are now extremely exotic, not to say bizarre. Mount has no trouble at all finding exemplary figures of early Christian times who would now, unlike the heroes of antiquity, be treated as mentally ill. St Anthony ‘boasted that he had never washed his feet in his life,’ and most Christians believed that baptism was the only bath that mattered in their lives. As for sexual expression, ‘an Egyptian monk of the fifth century dipped his cloak into the putrefying flesh of a dead woman so that the smell might banish thought about her.’ Many early thinkers believed, like Augustine, that marital relations were a matter of ‘descending with a certain sadness’ to the act.
All this seems barking mad to us now, and modern-day attempts to reconcile our neo-Pagan practices with Christian culture have their comic side. Mount has discovered some wonderful gym-going Roman Catholics, who
pray while using the rowing machine. ‘At the rate of one word per stroke, rowing one mile on the machine takes me one Our Father and two Hail Marys.’
In a still more unlikely juxtaposition, deconsecrated chapels and churches have been turned into temples to the body cult. At Claybury, in Chigwell, the chapel of a Victorian mental asylum has been turned into a gymnasium and pool, neatly bringing together two very different sites of guilt, penance, reparation and purification.
Inevitably, the argument comes down to regret that, whether you compare us to the ancients or the Christian era, we seem somewhat lacking — the Baths of Caracalla were no doubt rather more of a contribution to civilisation than a suburban spa, and Antinous a more impressive figure than this week’s reality TV star.
Ours is classical-lite, the sensuous, this-worldly way of living without the gravitas that underpinned it. And without that underpinning, there is something a little flat about it all.
Ferdinand Mount’s ingenious polemic skewers any number of modern-day vanities, and takes us with wit and charm through many absurdities of the remote past.
Ferdinand Mount Simon & Schuster, 256pp, £20
Unexpected parallels between our age and another are a staple of the jobbing journalist’s trade. Usually coinciding with a major exhibition at the Royal Academy, such arguments tend to claim that there are a surprising number of similarities between, say, the Byzantine Empire and the way we live now. Despite the fact that these arguments often result from a brain-storming session round the conference table, there is usually enough there to sustain a page or so. Human nature does not change so much, and some very unexpected idiosyncrasies recur at regular intervals.
Ferdinand Mount has set himself a rather more ambitious task, and his argument is more intricate than usual. He suggests that the characteristic fads of the classical world have, in recent decades, come back to us without our recognising the fact. The Greek and Roman love of pleasure, indulgence, fantasy and opulence are recapitulated in some of the most characteristic statements of our time. Jade Goody, the ‘spa experience’, Cherie Blair’s New Age entourage and Damien Hirst all have their ancient-world originals. There is nothing new under the sun.
Some of the parallels that Mount draws are startlingly close. An ancient foodie like Archestratus, in his snobbery and his geographical precision about where to get the best fish sounds exactly like a modern magazine writer on the subject: ‘When you come to Miletus, get from the Gaeson Marsh a kephalos-type grey mullet and a sea bass . . . that is where they are best.’ The ancient obsession with tales of exotically themed dinners was revived in the 19th century by Grimod de la Reynière’s famous funerary dinner, and J. K. Huysman’s Black Dinner. Such exotic themes at the dinner table continue to this day, courtesy of Heston Blumenthal, who has indeed cooked Roman dinners on television.
Mount has no trouble in drawing parallels between the immense contemporary ‘spa’ industry, devoted, in its hideous favourite word, to ‘pampering’, and the colossal baths of antiquity. We are at least as fascinated in the fatuous cult of athletic fitness as the ancients, and to much less obvious purpose. Mount casts a beady eye over the principal revivers of physical fitness in the modern age, the militarising Germans, and then wonders what it is all for:
There is little that seems ‘bold’ and ‘merry’ about our obsession with keeping in shape. On the contrary, it seems a somewhat timorous and joyless pastime, a sign of our fear of death rather than of our readiness to confront life.
He ventures, too, into the question of sex, and discovers that the rise, since the 1960s, of casual promiscuity — the ‘zipless fuck’, the expression ‘no strings attached’ — is much more like an aspect of the ancient mindset than we usually suspect. To the question ‘Do you fancy a shag?’
Theocritus or Catullus . . . would have been quite unmoved, and responded simply: ‘Your place or mine?’ For sex is as natural as eating and drinking. Why should anyone think twice about an invitation to a decent restaurant?
Not everything goes quite so convincingly into the parallel:
Just as there is scarcely a remote pueblo or hill village that is unaware of Mick Jagger, so Mithras was a familiar cult figure to soldiers and the local natives in places as far afield as Austria and Slovenia and Caernavon and Hadrian’s Wall.
And other points in his argument are not real parallels, though often amusingly explored. It is true that hardly anybody in the ancient world read silently; when St Augustine habitually did so, it was remarkable enough to be worth commenting on. Interesting as this is, I don’t think it can really be brought into comparison with the late unlamented Labour government’s apparent policy to make public libraries as noisy as possible: ‘Learning is not all about quiet contemplation. I want to see libraries full of life, rather than quiet and sombre. Attractive buildings exuding a sense of joy’, as Andy Burnham put it. He wasn’t talking about reading out loud: he was recommending meaningless yacking.
Nevertheless, some very unexpected comparisons turn out to bear fruit. The multiplicity of spiritual choices in the Roman Empire around the time of the Antonine emperors sounds very modern:
You could believe in anything or nothing. You could put your trust in astrologers, snake-charmers, prophets and diviners and magicians; you could take your pick between half a dozen creation myths and several varieties of resurrection.
In our contemporary, think-for-yourself, spiritual supermarket, heavily influenced by an increasingly multi-cultural mix, pretty well the same is true. Apart from (as far as I know) snake-charmers.
Even the most characteristic phenomenon of our times, the descent of random and undeserved celebrity, has an exact parallel. The Emperor Hadrian met and fell in love with an obscure farmer’s son from Bithynia on the Black Sea, Antinous; when he drowned in the Nile, Hadrian ordered an empire-wide cult of his lover, and thousands of images survive. There was nothing at all remarkable about Antinous, as far as we know, apart from his beauty, but that was enough. Antinous, who became a god, would have perfectly understood the careers of Kate Moss and Jade Goody.
These parallels between the ancient world and ours are intriguing. But perhaps the richest and most suggestive part of the argument comes when Mount addresses what came between; the huge stretch of time separating the ancients from us, when the beliefs and practices of society seem extraordinarily remote from our way of thinking. One of the main claims of this book is that we have become detached from the 1500 years of Christian thinking, and the culture which succeeded the Romans is now much more peculiar to us than they are.
Certainly, the Christian attitudes to sex, to food, to questions of the body such as washing and exercise are now extremely exotic, not to say bizarre. Mount has no trouble at all finding exemplary figures of early Christian times who would now, unlike the heroes of antiquity, be treated as mentally ill. St Anthony ‘boasted that he had never washed his feet in his life,’ and most Christians believed that baptism was the only bath that mattered in their lives. As for sexual expression, ‘an Egyptian monk of the fifth century dipped his cloak into the putrefying flesh of a dead woman so that the smell might banish thought about her.’ Many early thinkers believed, like Augustine, that marital relations were a matter of ‘descending with a certain sadness’ to the act.
All this seems barking mad to us now, and modern-day attempts to reconcile our neo-Pagan practices with Christian culture have their comic side. Mount has discovered some wonderful gym-going Roman Catholics, who
pray while using the rowing machine. ‘At the rate of one word per stroke, rowing one mile on the machine takes me one Our Father and two Hail Marys.’
In a still more unlikely juxtaposition, deconsecrated chapels and churches have been turned into temples to the body cult. At Claybury, in Chigwell, the chapel of a Victorian mental asylum has been turned into a gymnasium and pool, neatly bringing together two very different sites of guilt, penance, reparation and purification.
Inevitably, the argument comes down to regret that, whether you compare us to the ancients or the Christian era, we seem somewhat lacking — the Baths of Caracalla were no doubt rather more of a contribution to civilisation than a suburban spa, and Antinous a more impressive figure than this week’s reality TV star.
Ours is classical-lite, the sensuous, this-worldly way of living without the gravitas that underpinned it. And without that underpinning, there is something a little flat about it all.
Ferdinand Mount’s ingenious polemic skewers any number of modern-day vanities, and takes us with wit and charm through many absurdities of the remote past.
March 17, 2018
A good read in many respects, except on religion - for example, Christianity was the first great monotheistic religion (Judaism?), and all parents send their children to faith schools 'to be educated in a religious ethos' - despite the fact that many do so because they are rated highly by Ofsted. Absolutely slates atheists to the point of being as narrow-minded as those he criticises, and shows a wilful refusal to engage properly with their arguments. And most disappointingly of all, he could have said so much more about the Classical World itself. Disappointing.
December 2, 2020
A satisfactory read but on a subject that held only moderate interest to me. The book was a gift and not one I would have chosen myself.
July 27, 2011
Whilst I was hoping for slightly more intellectual rigour in this book, it was an entertaining enough read. Mount certainly draws enough parallels between modern and classical life for his argument to be believed: the similarities in the 'cult of the body', for example, the attention given to celebrities, the attitudes towards food and sex and entertainment.
I can well believe that to a very real extent society has come full circle and recaptured or rediscovered a lot of the attitudes and beliefs of classical life. There is a reason the Dark Ages was called thus, and it is not simply a lack of evidence and surviving documentation for the period - a lot of the knowledge that circulated in the Greek and Roman times was lost. Steam power, for example, was first invented in the Greek period; the Roman invention of indoor plumbing, underfloor heating, aqueducts were all lost for centuries.
Perhaps a far better book would be one which investigates just why so much was lost in the intervening years - it cannot solely be down to religion, a topic which Mount seems to be spend a little too much time on, without coming to any kind of concrete conclusion. Why did it take us so long to rediscover the societal norms and practices which the Greeks and Romans took for granted? Perhaps the real issue is not why we are coming full circle now, but what took us long in the first place?
I can well believe that to a very real extent society has come full circle and recaptured or rediscovered a lot of the attitudes and beliefs of classical life. There is a reason the Dark Ages was called thus, and it is not simply a lack of evidence and surviving documentation for the period - a lot of the knowledge that circulated in the Greek and Roman times was lost. Steam power, for example, was first invented in the Greek period; the Roman invention of indoor plumbing, underfloor heating, aqueducts were all lost for centuries.
Perhaps a far better book would be one which investigates just why so much was lost in the intervening years - it cannot solely be down to religion, a topic which Mount seems to be spend a little too much time on, without coming to any kind of concrete conclusion. Why did it take us so long to rediscover the societal norms and practices which the Greeks and Romans took for granted? Perhaps the real issue is not why we are coming full circle now, but what took us long in the first place?
July 22, 2011
I picked up this book by chance but glad not to have missed and will probably read more by Ferdinand Mount.
Mount's book is basically about what goes around comes around. He gives examples from both the material and spiritual side of human nature - the bath, gym, bedroom and kitchen as well as intellectual ideas of science, religion, new age dialogue, fame, art and nature. He cleverly demonstrates how life is basically "palindrome which tells the same story if you read it backwards and forwards".
We are not as modern as we think we are, but more ancient like the Romans and Greeks in thought and behaviour.
In large part our modern world is a reaction to Christianity.
But at the end a question still lingers about we are really here for. The Romans as Mount discusses, account for many good principles but along the way we have alao mislaid Scipio's Dream (from Caeser's "On the Republic") which is about how man should attain immortality.
This book demonstrates why its important to remember our history, which has so much to teach us. We might learn more about ourselves in the processs (as indeed I did).
Mount's book is basically about what goes around comes around. He gives examples from both the material and spiritual side of human nature - the bath, gym, bedroom and kitchen as well as intellectual ideas of science, religion, new age dialogue, fame, art and nature. He cleverly demonstrates how life is basically "palindrome which tells the same story if you read it backwards and forwards".
We are not as modern as we think we are, but more ancient like the Romans and Greeks in thought and behaviour.
In large part our modern world is a reaction to Christianity.
But at the end a question still lingers about we are really here for. The Romans as Mount discusses, account for many good principles but along the way we have alao mislaid Scipio's Dream (from Caeser's "On the Republic") which is about how man should attain immortality.
This book demonstrates why its important to remember our history, which has so much to teach us. We might learn more about ourselves in the processs (as indeed I did).
August 23, 2012
The fact that things come back and go round and round over cneturies, like things, ideas, thoughts from the Roman times are coming back to us in the 12th Century, sounded very interesting to me.
The beginning was very good whent he author made links between the use of baths in Roman time and now. I really enjoyed that part, the information given and the way it was written.
The toher subjecs were interestng on itheir own, but less well written and examined. Too much was told of our days and not enough linked to the Roman times.
There were some chapters which were better again, but the first chapter about the baths was the best of the whole book and it would have been great if the the rest of the book would have been like that.
The beginning was very good whent he author made links between the use of baths in Roman time and now. I really enjoyed that part, the information given and the way it was written.
The toher subjecs were interestng on itheir own, but less well written and examined. Too much was told of our days and not enough linked to the Roman times.
There were some chapters which were better again, but the first chapter about the baths was the best of the whole book and it would have been great if the the rest of the book would have been like that.
April 2, 2011
This book’s central thesis is that we have come round full circle since the time of ancient Greece and Rome and are now exhibiting many of their values and outlook. There are certainly some interesting parallels, particularly in terms of the cult of the body and the reverence for food, but I don’t think his case is entirely convincing.
Mount is primarily concerned with British society and writes extremely well. There are some good anecdotes and I found myself agreeing with many of his views on fame and the curse of too much dialogue. However, there was plenty I couldn’t endorse (Mount is on the political right), but it’s often good to have something to mentally push against.
Mount is primarily concerned with British society and writes extremely well. There are some good anecdotes and I found myself agreeing with many of his views on fame and the curse of too much dialogue. However, there was plenty I couldn’t endorse (Mount is on the political right), but it’s often good to have something to mentally push against.
February 9, 2015
At first I thought this book was a typical airport read and I regretted purchasing it. But I pushed on and found, although the author's thesis was sufficiently unsupported by evidence other than what one might glean from travelling around a bit, that I quite liked the Richard Dawkins bashing section enough to give it a go. There are some useful references to a number of other works I would like to read, and otherwise I am glad to have finished the book. Nevertheless, I must be more careful in future about how I choose my books. Airport books tend not to deliver value for the time spent - time that could be invested reading more important works. But we live and learn I suppose.
August 18, 2016
DNF at 150. If I had wanted a book about the modern christian church's comments on things I would have bought one. I don't.I wanted a book on Roman and Greece culture not to have to read the word Christianity a hundred times. I don't like books misrepresenting themselves that's all hence I have quit the book.
September 30, 2010
A thoroughbred book, tracing society's attitudes and mores. It is interesting to see that life as we know it and all our aspirations and modernity is a recycle of the classical world.
A good read for any one who like the classical world.
A good read for any one who like the classical world.
June 5, 2013
On the whole 3 stars. There was some of it that was just great, and is making me return to pre Socratic philosophy. Other chapters were a bit stretched. Overall, I would recommend it.
February 2, 2018
the first few chapters are really interesting and full of fascinating details, not only about the classical world and parallelisms with our own but also about other historical moments. It includes thorough reviews of authors and philosophical works that help understand his point. However the last 3 chapters drift away and get boring to the point where you don't see much the relationship with the central thesis. Another shortcoming is his excessive focus in the Anglo-Saxon world and in the UK in particular, which one would not expect of a book with such title and topic due to its implied universality.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews