The Rosetta Stone is not just the most popular object in the British Museum and the key that unlocked the language of ancient Egypt. The words on its 2,200-year-old surface are also highly political – at least to anyone who knows some Ptolemaic history. They disguise lies by an occupying power, alliances of convenience with local religious leaders, thirty years of revolt by superior local fighters and a “fake amnesty”, all elements of what our reviewer Oswyn Murray describes this week as “a typical Middle Eastern story”. Egyptology and military fiascoes come together again in Jane Jakeman’s review of the life of British swashbuckler John Pendlebury, a classic, glass-eyed hero of the old school, who both excavated the fields of Crete and, until excecuted by the Germans in 1941, fought to defend them.

Reviews in the TLS by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum have ranged over the years from self-importance at Harvard University to the dangers to democracy of ignoring the feminist agenda. This week she considers a new book on the “shared human weaknesses” shown in the Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971. She asks what is lacking in ordinary men and women who so easily become oppressors and torturers – at Stanford and at Abu Ghraib. Empathy and imagination are critical parts of her answer. But “the imagination is a muscle”, she writes, “that gets weak from routinized thinking and strong from vigorous challenges”.

Of all the philosophers of the seventeenth century, none has become so fashionable in our own time as Benedict de Spinoza. So explains our reviewer, Don Garrett, in a powerful explanation of Spinoza’s influence – from theoretical physics to the current debates on religion. Carolyne Larrington enjoys an irreverent account of an earlier thinker much cited since (and partly because of) his death. Socrates is “hero, villian, chatterbox and saint” to the classicist Emily Wilson. And also a character in some terrible modern novels.

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