Austria is not filled with domestic dungeons in which evil fathers – with full planning permission – abuse their daughters for decades at will. Or so Vienna’s anxious politicians are keen to tell us. Josef Fritzl’s fathering of seven children on his gaoled daughter over twenty four years could, it is said, have happened anywhere. Doubtless it could. Yet Austrian novels – from the teenage cellar girl with enlarged head (1852) to a two-roomed underground prison with musical instruments (1911) – suggest something of a pattern to our writer, Ritchie Robertson, not forgetting, of course, the contribution of Sigmund Freud to the genre.

Most students and teachers in the arts will need to grapple from time to time with the “gobbet”, the lump of text (originally something nastier) which needs to be identified, put in context and critically explained. This week, in an issue on current themes in ancient history, our Classics editor, Mary Beard, gives a new book on Cicero a good gobbeting – with notes on how it shows both virtues and vices in this traditional method. M. F. Burnyeat tells of Hillary Clinton in her underclothes before considering how – from ancient Greece to the medieval Islamic world – physical peculiarities have been seen as character predictors too. Nicholas Purcell remembers when the New Year was shifted to match the Roman Emperor’s birthday.

Top scientists are rarely masters of public relations – a failing for which the rest of us should be generally pleased. J. Craig Ventner – the Henry Ford of the genome project as our reviewer calls him – breaks the rule. His autobiography, A Life Decoded, associates the secrets of everyone’s life with the secrets of his own in a way which brings qualms as well as admiration.

Christopher Coker has been reading the twentieth-century reflections of our long-standing contributor Sir Michael Howard, “a deeply humane voice in an age of ideology”.

Peter Stothard

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