Uploaded October 2014 | Updated September 2026, 16 hours ago
We caught up with author Tom Holland just before he gave his talk at the Festival of Ancient Tales on Friday, and asked him about how he had first become interested in Classics. You'll hear Tom talk about his childhood passions for Asterix and dinosaurs, and his new book about the Roman Emperors!
We caught up with author Tom Holland just before he gave his talk at the Festival of Ancient Tales on Friday, and asked him about how he had first become interested in Classics. You'll hear Tom talk about his childhood passions for Asterix and dinosaurs, and his new book about the Roman Emperors!



![Classical Reception, Past, Present and Future, with Lorna Hardwick
CCs Anastasia Bakogianni talks with Lorna Hardwick, Emerita Professor at the Open University, about classical reception. Lorna has worked and published extensively in this research area. She is the author of Translating Words, Translating Cultures (Duckworth: 2000) and Reception Studies (Greece and Rome: 2003); she has also co-edited three significant collections Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds (Oxford University Press: 2007), A Companion to Classical Receptions (Blackwell: 2008) [link: http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405151676.html] and more recently Classics in the Modern World: A Democratic Turn? (OUP: 2013) [link: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199673926.do]. In addition she promotes new work in the field in her role as the general editor of the Classical Receptions Journal (OUP) [link: http://crj.oxfordjournals.org/]. Together with James I. Porter she is also the general editor of Classical Presences (OUP) [link: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/category/academic/series/classicalstudies/clpr.do], a series devoted to publishing monographs and edited collections that explore the multi-faceted field of classical reception. Lornas recent work investigates aspects of the reception of historiography. Her essays on this topic include Moving targets, Modern contests: Marathon and cultural memory, in C. Carey and M. Edwards, eds. (2013) Marathon - 2,500 Years, London, BICS, pp. 275-288, and Concepts, in N. Morley and C. Lee, eds., Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides, Malden MA and Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell (2014 forthcoming).
Lorna refers to the explosion of interest in the performance, adaptation and poetic responses to classical material in the last part of the 20th century. The reasons for this and its effects both on the creative arts and on how classics might be perceived in the future will be the concern of future cultural historians. To support this, Lorna has developed data bases that preserve information that might otherwise be ephemeral. Documentation and analysis of key examples of drama and poetry can be freely accessed on the website of the Reception of Classical Texts Project (www2.open.ac.uk/ClassicalStudies/GreekPlays). Classical Reception, Past, Present and Future, with Lorna Hardwick](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/h_jTT_RfNl8/mqdefault.jpg)






