FREDERIC RAPHAEL
ANTIQUITY MATTERS Yale, 368pp,£20, Oldie price £15.36 inc p&p Frederic Raphael – man of parts, Oscar-winning screenwriter, author of The Glittering Prizes and countless volumes of memoir – is also what he calls an ‘accidental classicist’, having taken up the subject as a prep-school boy and read Classics at Cambridge. It has been a simmering presence in the background to his intellectual career, and in this new book – ‘more a montage than any kind of textbook’ – Raphael offers some personal reflections on the value of the classical world, and on its enduring influence on our own.
Daisy Dunn, in Standpoint magazine, likened Raphael to Catullus – a critic who ‘skewered his enemies with erudition veiled by colloquialism and crudity. Wearing his learning as lightly as possible, he provided a lesson in writing outside the academy as much as against it.
‘Raphael is a scholar in Catullus’ mould, concerned more with reinterpreting the classics for his own pleasure than masquerading as one of the “old, learned, respectable bald heads” whom WB Yeats mocked, wearing the carpet with their shoes and coughing in ink and thinking what other people think.’
She admired, by contrast, Raphael’s dash and erudition: ‘Eschewing the academy for the lyceum, he takes in the philosophy, history and literature of Greece and Rome while issuing the odd barb at the fustiness of scholarship.’