Author Archives: residentjudge

In Our Time (BBC) Julian the Apostate ruled between 361-363 (so only a short reign) after being proclaimed Caesar by his troops in Gaul. He was born in Constantinople and raised as a Christian after his uncle Constantine had converted to Christianity and introduced a policy of toleration of Christianity across the empire. Julian himself was attracted to Platonic philosophy and neo-Platinism which combined religious, philosophical and mythological strands and a leaning towards Greco-Roman polytheism. He was a bit of philosopher king himself, writing satires about the other Caesars, and writing a lot about himself. To bolster his legitimacy (he did, after all, challenge his cousin for the position of Emperor), he launched a series of battles in Persia, which backfired. His big mistake was not to have a succession plan when he died in battle. The three historians James Corke-Webster from Kings College London, Lea Niccolai from Cambridge and Shaun Tougher from Cardiff University note that, ironically, he united the squabbling Christians in opposition to him. It wasn’t so much that he persecuted Christians, as that he revoked the privileges that Constantine had given them. Paganism had continued throughout Constantine’s reign too, so it’s not black-and-white. Very much ripe for what-if history. (I’d forgotten that Julian was a theme in Julian Barnes’ Elizabeth Finch– my review here).

Three Million (BBC) The final episode 5.Ghosts looks at the legacy of the Bengal famine which, compared with the D-Day Landing celebrations, is decidedly low-key. Retired teacher Sailen Sarkar has been travelling throughout Bengal, interviewing the now very-old survivors, who mainly wondered why they hadn’t been asked about it before. As one of the historians who contributed to this series points out, what with the loss of Indian lives fighting for the Commonwealth, Partition and natural disasters, there was a series of mass death events in India. It was the Black Lives Matter protests in England that prompted a re-evaluation of colonial administration on the part of the British Empire, and there is now mention of the famine in a military museum in London. Doesn’t seem quite enough somehow.

Emperors of Rome Caillan Davenport features in this episode on CXI The Equestrian Order. The equites belonged to a class of Roman citizen dating back to the kingdom of Rome. The numbers of Senators was capped, so the equestrian order kept expanding. It was a conditional status- every five years at the census you had to prove that you still met the property requirement, and you could be removed for lapses in civic and moral virtue. The Equestrians portrayed themselves as being less corrupt than the Senators. The reign of Augustus was a turning point, when he gave the Equestrians a role in the civic celebrations. The number of Equestrians expanded from 5,000 to 20,000 under Augustus, and gradually a career structure emerged. Equestrians were permitted to wear a special ring, a tunic with a narrow stripe and could sit in the first 14 rows of the theatre. There was no specified meeting place for the Equestrians (unlike the Senators, who had the Senate) and so they expressed their feelings at the theatre. By the late 3rd century the role of Emperor had become open to those who were promoted through the army, and then under Constantius the number of senators was increased, thus decreasing the status of the Equestrians.

History Extra Death By Nostalgia: The curious history of a dangerous emotion This episode features Agnes Arnold-Forster, the author of Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion. She defines nostalgia as a bitter/sweet, wistful feeling about the past. At the end of the 17th century it was seen as a medical disease, related to place, and a form of pathological homesickness. People could die of nostalgia as they starved themselves to death, and mercenary soldiers, university students and domestic servants were particularly prone to it. In the early twentieth century psychoanalysts became interested, and it shifted from a medical to a psychological problem. Nostalgia is often characterized as being working-class, backward looking (e.g. Brexit, Trump) but the Left can be nostalgic too, especially the Soviet bloc countries and people who yearn after the NHS. However, now nostalgia can be seen as a form of therapy, to make people feel better.

Good grief- I am so behind in blogging this listening! However, I mainly do it for my own purposes, in keeping track of what I listened to and when, so I guess it doesn’t matter.

The Rest is History Episode 434 Luther: The Revolution Begins (Part 2) According to legend, one of the reasons that Luther became a monk was because of a thunderstorm. It must have been quite a storm, but perhaps another reason was to get away from his father’s ambitions that he become a lawyer. His father was not pleased, standing up to question during Luther’s induction as a monk “Was it the Devil that sent the thunderstorm?” In becoming an Augustinian monk, Luther was buying into the spiritual economy of the time i.e. getting a fast track to God. He studied theology at Wittenburg University, a university under the patronage of Frederick, the Elector of Saxony, one of the electors of the Holy Roman Emperor. Frederick wanted celebrity academics at his university, and Luther became a professor of the Bible. He ordered that a bible be printed for him without the glosses and footnotes, and began writing up theses rejecting Aristotelian philosophy and medieval theology that had dominated thinking, arguing that we should rely on The Bible Alone. Then a friar called Johann Tetzel rolled into Saxony, claiming to sell indulgences, which would allow sinful locals to shorten their stay in purgatory. This spurred Luther to have his 95 theses document printed (not nailed up onto the door) and the fight was on.

Rear Vision (ABC) Rear Vision recently had a 2 part series about the two-state solution which our Government, along with other Western governments, has been calling for more loudly since the invasion of Gaza in response to October 7. The first part The Middle East Conflict and the Two-state solution is a replay of a 2009 episode. Modern calls for a two-state solution began in 1917 where Balfour made a promise of ‘from the river to the sea’ to both Zionists and the Arabs. The Balfour Declaration was put directly into the British Mandate which gave civil and religious rights to “the others” – who just happened to be 90% of the population. There was an Arab uprising in 1936-9, leading to the Peel Commission, which recommended a two-state solution which was rejected by the Arabs – and then WW2 intervened. In 1947 Palestine was handed over to the UN, which gave more than 50% of the land to the Jews. The Declaration of Israel in 1948 led immediately to war, which eventuated with Jewish occupation of 78% of the land. The PLO was formed in 1964, and further wars in 1967 and 1973 saw the Israeli capture of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Another uprising in the 1980s led to the realization that uprising did not mean sovereignty, and the Palestinians moved towards a two-state solution The 1993 Oslo Accord did not mention two states, and further uprisings between 2000 and 2005 marked the continuing distrust between the Palestinians and Israelis.

The second part The Two-State Solution: A Way Forward or More of the Same takes us up to 2024. Illegal settlements began in Palestinian territory in the early 1970s, as Israeli politics oscillated between Labor and Likud. Camp David came closest to a two-state solution, but all the politicians involved were lame-duck incumbents. A split opened up between the PLO and Hamas. Originally the presence of 100,000 illegal settlers was seen as the point of no return for a 2-state solution. There are now 750,000 settlers in the occupied territories and none of the big players are pushing for two states anymore: not the Republicans in US, not Hamas and not Likud. In 2005 Israel withdrew from Gaza, but it never gave up control of border crossings or property rights.

Things Fell Apart (BBC) Season 2 Episode 8: Mikki’s Hero’s Journey focuses on Mikki Willis, an independent filmmaker who has been involved, to a lesser or major extent, in all the preceding episodes of this series. His brother had died of AIDS, and Mikki blamed AZT which was, at the time, a harsh but ultimately effective treatment. He was strongly influenced by Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journal, not as a piece of analysis, but as a prescription for action. He set up his documentary company after 9/11 and at first became famous through a YouTube video praising his son for choosing a Little Mermaid doll with a credit note at the toy shop (he has since taken this video down). He interviewed Judy Mikovits as part of his Plandemic documentary, he was at the Capitol during the riots, and he particularly blames Dr Anthony Fauci (who had also been involved in AZT all those years ago.

In the finale How Things Fell Apart Bonus Episode, Jon Ronson chats with fellow podcaster Adam Buxton about the making of the podcast, and how to sensitively interview people whose views of reality clash completely with your own.

Emperors of Rome. Episode CX Anthology of Interest A triumvirate! Here Matt, Rhiannon and Caillan Davenport each have three minutes to talk about a topic of their own choice, three times over. So they discuss:

• The unfortunate demise of Cinna the poet
• Cicero’s reluctance to send panthers to those in need
• The sensitive subject of baldness
• PTSD bought on by the Carthaginian War
• Women donning a toga
• Claudius’ edicts and defending ‘stupidity’
• The last of the Ptolemys
• The hazard of regifting the world’s largest apple

I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist Episode 3: It’s the End of the World as We Know It Going back to the beginning with this podcast, Brian and Troy talk about the importance of ‘end-times’ talk in attracting them to fundamentalist pentacostalism. One of them (I’m not really clear who is who when I’m listening to this) was already primed for apocalyptic thinking because of dabbling in woo-woo thinking; the other one was already ensconced in the Assembly of God, where it was a mainstay. First there was the fear of nuclear holocaust, then when the Berlin Wall fell, it was fear of economic domination through the cashless society and the mark of The Beast as a computer chip or bar-code, and now it’s the prospect of a Muslim-Christian war. However, as they point out, the early Christians thought that they were living in the end-times too, and God didn’t turn up then either.

Being Roman (BBC) Episode 6: Love in the Borderlands Mary starts off this episode in Newcastle UK, close to Hadrian’s Wall, with a tombstone erected to Regina by her ex-owner and then husband Barates from Palmyra in Syria. Regina was a local Newcastle girl, and obviously there was slave-owning in Roman Britain although it is so late in the empire that she must have been sold into slavery rather than taken captive, as occurred earlier. When the Victorians uncovered the tombstone, they framed it as a love story where the local girl captured the heart of the foreigner, but we wonder just how much freedom Regina had. Mary finishes with a good reflection on the way that we read artefacts according to our own view of the world, but that this is not necessarily a fault- instead it’s a way of keeping questions alive in history.

The Daily The Possible Collapse of the U.S. Home Insurance System. Recorded on 15/5/24. I remember reading T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth years ago, where American society was drifting into neglect because no-one could afford insurance. I’m very much aware of how insurance is driving so much in society today: where you can build, what management policies a company has to cover their arse, the way that someone always has to be held liable. In this episode, they discuss the succession of weather ‘events’ (such dead language) that are making home insurance unsustainable when companies need to pay out more than they receive. Companies are starting to refuse to cover houses in certain areas, which has implications for future buyers who cannot get a mortgage on an uninsurable home, leading to a drop in home values. ‘The Government’ could step in (unlikely in America) but that just means that people would continue to build homes in areas prone to repeated disasters. At least after Black Saturday our government banned people building in certain areas. Interesting.

Three Million BBC Episode 4: The Tapes As part of the research for this project, a box of old cassette tapes was uncovered, recorded by Australian researcher Lance Brennan decades ago. Brennan interviewed colonial civil servants who were based in Bengal themselves, but answering to Whitehall and its demands. Britain’s attention was focussed on WW2 and they resisted declaring famine because it would divert resources from the war. Emergency food relief was provided, but ‘test work’ was required in exchange. Then, the British Govt said that it couldn’t spare the ships, and besides, other people were starving too. Even historian Max Hasting, a great fan of Churchill, admits that Churchill was racist, even by the standards of his time.

History Extra An Obscenity Trial That Shocked Victorian Britain tells the story of Annie Besant and her friend and partner-in-crime Charles Bradlaugh who published a book Fruits of Philosophy by American writer Charles Knowlton about conception and contraception. Annie Besant had married a minister at the age of 18, but the marriage was unhappy and she left him. Her husband retained custody of one of her two children. She became a needleworker and went to Bethnal Green where she met Charles Bradlaugh, a dissenting minister. He was 40 and she was 26. In 1876 he encouraged her to speak publicly about contraception (something that women rarely did) to the National Secular Society. When the bookseller of Fruits of Philosophy was arrested and fined, she wanted to be arrested for publishing it as well, as a test case. She represented herself in a highly publicized case. The jury found the book obscene, but Besant and Bradlaugh were found not guilty. Meanwhile, her former husband sued for custody of her other child. She was involved with the Fabians, Home Rule and she championed the cause of the Match Girls. She went to India and became involved in Theosophy, which led her to renounce her books, smashing the plates so that they couldn’t be republished. Given that US politicians are invoking the Comstock Act of 1873 to prevent the sale of abortion drugs today, it’s a throw-back to the days when selling and publishing information about contraception was illegal.

Lives Less Ordinary (BBC) My Grandmother Walked the Rabbit Proof Fence Australians are familiar with the story of the young indigenous girls who walked the Rabbit Proof fence after being stolen from their families, but I’m not sure how widely their story spread internationally. So it’s important that the BBC has picked up this story. What I didn’t realize is that -shamefully- the story spread across three generations, right up to recent events. Doris Pilkington, who wrote the book (which I reviewed here) has now died, and the story is being taken up by Maria Pilkington, her daughter, who herself had to resist attempts to have her own child taken from her. A sobering corrective to the idea that all this was long ago and long past.

The Rest is History. Episode 432 Titanic: The Survivors (Part 6). And so I finally come to the end of this 6-part series- surely the longest that Tom and Dominic have done so far. They talk about the aftermath of the sinking and the rescue by the Cunard ship ‘Carpathian’. They point out that gender was more important than class: 74% of women and 52.3% of children survived, but only 20% of men survived. They suggest that the death rate was so high in second class because of the values of deference and not wanting to make a fuss. At first the London newspapers said that few had died. The port cities of Southampton and Liverpool were particularly affected because so many of the crew came from those cities. People wanted someone to blame, and Ismay was the man, as was reflected in James Cameron’s film, but as a later inquiry headed by Lord Mersey found, the Titanic adhered to what was “standard practice” at the time. But very soon the sinking was cast in a proud, jingoistic, heroic mode. Many suffered from survivors’ guilt. The first film was made just four weeks after the sinking, starring an actress who had actually been on the boat. The 1955 book A Night to Remember by Walter Lord was written from interviews, but Lord didn’t actually take notes. Then of course there is the James Cameron film, which has immortalized the sinking for a new generation. The sinking took place two years before WWI, and has come to represent a cliched metaphor of gathering disaster. The Bishop of Winchester blamed greed and capitalism, and Winston Churchill used it as an excuse to have a slap at lady teachers (of all people). A good series.

Being Roman (BBC) Episode 5 Battling Bureaucrats tells the story of Apolinarius of Panopolis who is an obsequious, pedantic middle-ranking bureaucrat in Egypt, who is freaking out because Emperor Diocletian is going to visit, and nothing is ready. He wrote 12 letters over two weeks in which he threatened, cajoled and upbraided traders and other bureaucrats, but he was essentially impotent as everyone was covering their own arse. One of the demands he was making was for marble columns from Aswan and he did manage to get those. They were used in constructing baths, but they ended up in a church where they stand today.