Mark Humphries

Rigatoni ai peperoni

Spiced bulgur and lentil pilaf.

Rukmini Iyer's chickpea, cavolo nero, and harissa gratin.

I am rubbish at keeping BlueSky updated, and getting a new phone didn't help. So to get restarted, here are three vegetarian meals from the past few days: proof I'm home alone at the moment.

Female torso holding the two volumes of A Companion to Rome, c. 400-1050

For real!

Tomorrow, 21 January, 4-6pm, in person and online!
Until March, you will also be able to get a 35% discount, see below.
(I realise that the volumes are still prohibitively expensive 😢)

6 January is Epiphany, marking the visit of the Magi from the East to the infant Christ (Matthew 2.1-12). It always prompts me to reflect on how late antique Christians imagined this episode, repurposing iconographic tropes from secular art to visualise this key moment in the Nativity story.

❤️ Back where it all started (in spite of the university starting to renovate the rooms we had booked the day before it started...).

I pretended to be Brian Clough and got the whole team to lay into her.

After nearly 19 and a half years, I must be beginning to look somewhat native to these parts. A woman just approached me in Greggs in Pontardawe and said: "I thought you were Michael Sheen for a moment." Luckily for her, there is an optician just across the road....

We had snow. The kids loved it!

Happy New Year! Ianuarius from a calendar mosaic, c.200, from El Djem, Tunisia. Image: Ad Meskens / Wikimedia Commons.l

Meanwhile on Irish breakfast television.

A man in a suit (Zaid Ghazi Saadallah, Director of the Mosul Cultural Museum) in front of the damaged interior of a building, lecturing to a group of schoolchildren.

After Islamic State militants took Mosul, Iraq in 2015, they vandalised the Mosul Cultural Museum and its collections. Now, the museum is gradually being brought back to life so that the citizens of Mosul can again identify with and learn from Iraq’s rich cultural heritage.

🏺 #Archaeology 1/2

More defaced images of Constantius II and Eudoxia from Friday's Being Human event in Cardiff.

Really busy week, part two. I was invited by colleagues in Cardiff to participate in a Being Human Festival event on satire for high school pupils. I got them to deface images of Constantius II and Eudoxia in line with how those figures had been lampooned. The results were fabulous.

Really busy week, part one: on Wednesday I participated in an online discussion of Hendrik Dey and Fabrizio Oppedisano's new book in Justinian's Legacy. Thanks to colleagues at Perugia for honouring me with the invitation.

Pedagogical highlight of the week: (1) discussing Ammianus Marcellinus' account
of the death of Valentinian I, in which the emperor, in his fatal seizure, attempts to communicate by flailing his arms like a boxer; and (2) having one of the students voluntarily acting out what this looked like.

And now for something completely different: more proofs! This time featuring: how I became a historian of the ancient world thanks to the combined effects of a trip to Egypt and growing up in Belfast and Dublin.

This is a terrific novel. The cadences of the language brought me back to a Belfast I left more than forty years ago.

Shostakovich: a programme marking 50 years since his death. There is, for understandable reasons, a small group with Ukrainian flags outside the hall.

All set for an orchestral concert for the first time in goodness knows how long. I used to go quite frequently to such events. I couldn't pass up a chance to listen to the mighty Seventh: it must be twenty years since last I heard it performed live.

#readingcharitably Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, from the Swansea Oxfam Bookshop. A lyrical exploration of the meanings of humanity and existence. The looming presences of the Earth and the space station impressiveness not as much as the astronauts carrying all humankind's dreams and anxieties.

Episode 4, which I think will air this Friday -- we watched all episodes on streaming.

Always a satisfying feeling. Incidentally, the new Mitchell and Webb series on Channel 4, though very, very hit and miss, contains one gem of a sketch in which E. M. Forster discusses writing Howards End with members of a writers' workshop, who attempt to offer him advice on how to make it better.

In my lunch today, I found a happy chickpea with a very unconvincing comb over.

More proofs. This time for a review of a gem of a book.

Exciting new series from @livunipress.bsky.social , Translated Texts from Antiquity (TTA to join TTH and TTB) , launches with two excellent volumes on #pomponiusmela and #suetonius I'm very honoured to be involved in this new venture.

#readingcharitably I just finished Bernardine Evaristo's _Girl, Woman, Other_. (Purchased for a quid in the Swansea British Heart Foundation shop.) What a revelation of a book: a life affirming, celebration of a Britain enriched by multiculturalism and intersectionalities.

Summer reading 2025, eclectic as ever. (Not shown: articles, typescripts, student drafts.)

Hunting the (bitter and belligerent) legacy of antiquity in Place Vendôme, Paris.

Yes, indeed: with that horror McGregor somehow being presented as an acceptable choice for the presidency. (Telling that *he* got to see the Orange Mussolini on actual St Patrick's day, but the government reps were shunted to another day.)

It is shocking how retrograde opinions have become mainstream in recent years. This country has changed so much in the 18 years since I moved here. The poisonous debates that began with the Brexit referendum have just grown worse.