History and the Movies

The comments on my post about 300 suggest that folk are still unconvinced by the prospects for the movie.

Here - the historian Victor Davis Hanson writes graciously about this new film of the Spartans' finest hour. (C'mon Chris, give it a break, it's got a blog.)

Hanson's involvement with the film can't help but remind me of Robin Lane Fox's far deeper commitment to Oliver Stone's 'Alexander'.

You'd think that academic historians would most likely be argumentative, hyper-sensitive, nit picking controversy hounds, but experience suggests that they seem to be generous and indulgent mentors of anyone who is trying to spark interest in their discipline with a movie.

........... or maybe they're just star struck like me.

(It made me smile when Hanson mentioned Steven Pressfield’s novel Gates of Fire in his article, as I am currently holding Chris's copy of it hostage as he his holding my copy of Hanson's own A War Like No Other rather in the way that ancient kings used to keep the children of rivals and neighbours at their courts as guarantees of good behaviour.)