Obiter dicta, or something to say in Latin

Homo sapiens consulting a vademecum

Latin isn’t dead; it’s everywhere, perhaps more than we realise – alibi, agenda, consensus, versus, homo sapiens, veto, alias, via, affidavit, vademecum, an item carried around, especially a handbook, and those indispensables i.e. (id est) ‘that is’, and etc. (et cetera) ‘and the rest’.

Maths lovers and problem […]

Cursing the Roman way

Roman curse tablet from Bath (Photo by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net))

The wish to curse a rival, a rip-off merchant, or somebody who cuts us up on the motorway or pushes in front of us in the queue for the first life-saving coffee of the day, is an age old instinct. Nowadays, when we […]

"What if" stories – historical fiction?

Historical fiction is a broad church; a re-telling real events, quasi-biographical fiction, romantic, adventure, fantastical and detective stories, tales from the cave to the 1960s and set in every country and social situation you can imagine. And within that mix are counter-factual, alternative history stories, the ‘what ifs’ which project a possible different timeline from […]