Author Archives: Peter Kruschwitz

About Peter Kruschwitz

Berliner. Classicist. Scatterbrain.

I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do…

Posted on July 3, 2014 by Peter Kruschwitz

Last week’s blog post dealt with one of the more bizarre little incidents from the 2014 FIFA world cup – Luis Suárez’s biting of Giorgio Chiellini. An equally iconic scene of this year’s world cup, rather more amusing, was that … Continue reading →

Posted in Prose | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Love Bites

Posted on June 27, 2014 by Peter Kruschwitz

One of the more bizarre stories of the 2014 FIFA World Cup was the Luis Suárez biting incident: Uruguay’s striker, currently playing for Liverpool, bit Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini. Suárez has a remarkable history of this peculiar behaviour: Meanwhile, the incident … Continue reading →

Posted in Carmina Epigraphica, Epigraphy, Poetry | Tagged | 2 Comments

Ulpian and Cicero on Internet Security

Posted on June 19, 2014 by Peter Kruschwitz

A strange thing happened the other day. On one of the main Classics-related listservs, the Liverpool-based ‘Classicist list‘, an email that contained several internal, private email messages (that clearly were never intended to be seen by anyone other than their … Continue reading →

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Pygmalion Takes the Turing Test

Posted on June 13, 2014 by Peter Kruschwitz

A few days ago, my colleague Prof. Kevin Warwick organised a Turing test competition at the Royal Society in London (in conjunction with the University of Reading), on occasion of the 60th anniversary of Alan Turing‘s death. Hailed as a … Continue reading →

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Children, Love, and Memory

Posted on June 10, 2014 by Peter Kruschwitz

Reading’s magnificent Saint Laurence church houses many a Latin inscription, some of which date back as far as the late medieval period. Among these treasures, there is a remarkable funerary monument, dedicated to one Martha Hamley: The monument displays a … Continue reading →

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Demagoguery and Populism

Posted on May 26, 2014 by Peter Kruschwitz

In the wake of recent elections, both at a local level in Britain and, more generally, for the European Parliament, there was a lot of talk about the (continued) rise of demagogues and populism, often with a backwards nationalist or … Continue reading →

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Neither the First, Nor the Wurst

Posted on May 15, 2014 by Peter Kruschwitz

When Conchita Wurst, the carefully designed and meticulously planned stage persona of the Austrian artist Tom Neuwirth, won the 2014 European Song Contest with his song Rise Like A Phoenix, a majority of people simply enjoyed the power of music … Continue reading →

Posted in Poetry, Prose | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Divine Riches of the Latin Language

Posted on May 8, 2014 by Peter Kruschwitz

My son’s interest in the Latin language, fuelled by his engaging Latin teacher, remains unbroken. Recently, for example, he wished to discuss the authenticity of some volumes of John Maddox Roberts‘s beautifully entertaining SPQR series with me (to a depth … Continue reading →

Posted in Education, Epigraphy, History of Reading, Poetry, Prose | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Pompeii 3D

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Peter Kruschwitz

Paul W. S. Anderson’s Pompeii film – marketed as Pompeii 3D – has been released in the UK after all (how did the dubbing from English into English take so long…?). In the aesthetic tradition of the peplum films, Pompeii … Continue reading →

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Mortifying Teachers

Posted on April 29, 2014 by Peter Kruschwitz

Traumatic, unbearable experiences that seem to shatter our grasp of reality trigger a simple coping mechanism: when one encounters something that seems to come close to our wildest nightmares in real life, one is inclined to narrativise, to fictionalise – … Continue reading →

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