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Note: Although the Anglo-Hellenic League is a member society of the Hellenic Centre, and has a post-box at the Hellenic Centre, it is not affiliated with the Hellenic Community Trust or the Hellenic Centre in any other way. If you would like to contact the Hellenic Centre, you will find information here. We regret that we are unable to forward messages to the Hellenic Centre. 

The Anglo-Hellenic League

Dedicated to promoting Anglo-Greek understanding and friendship, through charitable and cultural work. 

News                                                                                            

Dr Iain Gordon Brown FSA FRSE

‘Edinburgh as the Athens of the North’ 

Friends Room, Hellenic Centre, 16/18 Paddington Street, London W1U 5AS

Tuesday, 7 March 2023, 7pm 

 

In the years between about 1810 and 1850, Edinburgh – long and affectionately known as ‘Auld Reekie’ – came to think of itself and to be widely regarded as something else. The city became ‘Modern Athens’, or subsequently ‘the Athens of the North’. This phrase is well-known, but tends to disguise the often confused and contradictory messages hidden within the convenience of a trite term.

 

Dr Iain Gordon Brown’s new book Auld Greekie: Edinburgh as the Athens of the North examines the circumstances underlying a remarkable change in perception of a place and an age. It looks in detail at the ‘when’, the ‘why’, the ‘by whom’, the ‘how’ and the ‘with what consequences’ of the most interesting and complex metamorphosis of one modern, northern city into an image (whether physical, or spiritual or both) of another, ancient city remote in time and location. The story has its topographical, artistic and architectural dimensions – ‘the Modern Athens’ came to boast a splendid assemblage of Greek Revival buildings forming a townscape without peer – but also its social, cerebral and philosophical ones. Many Edinburgh citizens thought and spoke of themselves as ‘Modern Athenians’. In doing so, however, they laid themselves open to ridicule, ranging from benign satire to hostility and vituperation. Opposition to the notion of a ‘Greek’ Edinburgh – in terms of civic consciousness, and in the physical expression of that ideal (to many perceived as alien and un-Scottish) through the elegant and scholarly Greek Revival style of architecture and design – forms a major part of a story forming a fascinating episode in the history of British taste. 

 

Edinburgh of the late Enlightenment may well have been thought of, for one reason or another, as ‘Athenian’. But, in essence, it remained what it had always been. Maybe, however, for a brief period it was really a sort of hybrid city: ‘Auld Greekie’. 

 

We are delighted that Dr Iain Gordon Brown has agreed to talk to us, through what will be a richly illustrated lecture, about the concept and reality of Edinburgh as the Athens of the North. 

 

Dr Iain Gordon Brown, whose academic career began as a student of ancient history and classical archaeology, is a graduate of the universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge and a Fellow of both the Society of Antiquaries of London and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was formerly Principal Curator of Manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland, where he is now an Honorary Fellow. Between 2012 and 2017, he held the elected office of Curator of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s national academy. Having served as President of the Old Edinburgh Club and as a Trustee of Edinburgh World Heritage, Iain is currently an Associate of the Centre for the History of the Book in the University of Edinburgh. He is a Vice-President of the Edinburgh Decorative and Fine Arts Society. In 2014 he was appointed Consultant to the Robert and James Adam Drawings Cataloguing Project at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.

 

A widely-published scholarly author, Iain has written extensively on a broad range of inter-related subjects connected with the period of the Enlightenment, and especially on the literature, art and architecture of the golden age of Scottish culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Auld Greekie brings together many of his long-standing interests, and builds on a lifetime’s study of place and period.

 

This event is open to members and supporters of the league. A wine reception will follow. Entry is free, but prior registration is required. Sign up through Eventbrite herePlease book well in advance (registration closes on 6 March). 

 

Council of the League

6 February 2023

JUDGES ANNOUNCE THE LONG LIST FOR THE RUNCIMAN AWARD 2023 

PRESS NOTICE

The judging panel for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award, given annually for a book about Greece, has agreed a long list of 24 books for the competition in 2023.

Out of 47 books submitted for the Award, the judges selected 24 to form their long list. The list, which covers books published globally in English in 2022, includes books on history, biography, literature and philosophy, plus novels, poetry and literary translation. The books selected span Hellenic experience from antiquity until today.

The full long list of 24 titles is attached.

The Award Ceremony for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2023 is scheduled to be held in the Great Hall of King’s College London on Monday 19 June 2023, at 7pm. Details of the award ceremony and of the short list will be announced in due course. 

The Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award is sponsored by the A.C. Laskaridis Charitable Foundation and the A.G. Leventis Foundation. The value of the prize to the winner is £10,000.

Council of the League

10 January 2023

 

NOTES:

Since 1986, the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award has rewarded annually the best book published in the previous year in English about Greece or on a Greek subject. The Award is open to scholarly and creative books and to translations into English of Greek literary works. 

The judges for the Award in 2023 are:

Prof. Peter Frankopan (chair)

Dr Vassiliki Kolocotroni

Prof. Judith Mossman

Dr Oliver Thomas 

Dr Sofka Zinovieff 

Keep up with our news on: www.runcimanaward.org and www.anglohellenicleague.org.  

Enquiries to: John Kittmer (Award Administrator) runciman@anglohellenicleague.org  

 

THE ANGLO-HELLENIC LEAGUE RUNCIMAN AWARD 2023

LONG LIST

Title

Author

Press

Period

Genre

RRP

 

SCHOLARLY BOOKS

 

Nafplio: Biography of a Greek Town

Matt Stanley

Aetos Press

Diachronic

History

£12.99

 

Looking for Theophrastus: Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher

Laura Beatty

Atlantic Books

Antiquity

History of Philosophy

£16.99

The Greek Myths that Shape the Way We Think

Richard Buxton

Thames & Hudson

Antiquity

Mythology / Literature

£20

Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity

Sarah F. Derbew

CUP

Antiquity

Literature / Art History / Anthropology

£29.99

Herodotus and Imperial Greek Literature: Criticism, Imitation, Reception

N. Bryant Kirkland

OUP

Antiquity

History

£64

The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture

Jason König

Princeton UP

Antiquity

Cultural History

£35

A New History of Greek Mathematics

Reviel Netz

CUP

Antiquity

History of Ideas

£34.99

The Classical Parthenon: Recovering the Strangeness of the Ancient World

William St Clair

Open Book Publishers

Antiquity

History / Art History

£40.30 / £25.95

The Lives of Ancient Villages: Rural Society in Roman Anatolia

Peter Thonemann

CUP

Antiquity

History / Ethnography

£29.99

Exposed: The Greek and Roman Body

Caroline Vout

Profile

Antiquity

Art History

£25

 

The Christian Invention of Time: Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity

Simon Goldhill

CUP

Late Antiquity / Byzantium

Literature / History / Cultural History / Religion

£34.99

Symeon Stylites the Younger and Late Antique Antioch: From Hagiography to History

Lucy Parker

OUP

Late Antiquity / Byzantium

History / Religion

£75

New Rome: The Roman Empire in the East, AD 395 - 700

Paul Stephenson

Profile

Late Antiquity / Byzantium

History

£30

 

Not Far From Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars

Daisy Dunn

W&N

Modern

Literature / Biography / History of Scholarship

£20

The Improbable Heroine: Lela Karayanni and the British Secret Services in World War II Greece

Stylianos Perrakis

De Gruyter

Modern 

Biography

£90

Who Saved the Parthenon? A New History of the Acropolis Before, During and After the Greek Revolution

William St Clair

Open Books Publishers

Modern

History

£50.95 / £40.95

 

CREATIVE BOOKS / TRANSLATIONS

 

Stone Blind: Medusa’s Story

Natalie Haynes

Pan Macmillan / Mantle

Antiquity

Fiction 

£18.99

Lion

Conn Iggulden

Penguin

Antiquity

Fiction

£20

A Little Brown Sea

Charles Foster

Fair Acre

Modern

Fiction

£18.99 / £9.99

Fear of Light

Julietta Harvey

Starhaven 

Modern 

Fiction

£12.50

 

This Afterlife: Selected Poems

A.E. Stallings

Carcanet

Diachronic

Poetry

£25.19 / £15.99

Imperium

Jay Gao

Carcanet

Antiquity

Poetry

£11.99

Heritage Aesthetics

Anthony Anaxagorou

Granta Books

Modern

Poetry

£10.99

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greek Folk Songs

Translator:Joshua Barley

Aiora Press

Diachronic

Translation

£12.99

 

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