While directors of British theatres and concert halls wait anxiously for government budget cuts, there is a note of pure nostalgia in Richard Rutherford’s review this week of Festschrifts for two great British classical scholars, Oliver Taplin and Pat Easterling. One of the contributors calculates that the cost to golden age Athens of a single festival of tragedies and comedies was equivalent to 5 per cent of annual military spending. Great art, including such ancillary items as a procession of 200 giant phalluses, came at great cost. On that basis the Royal Shakespeare Company could claim £1.5 billion for its 2010 season. For anyone stretching the comparison further into hope and unreality, the Lincoln Center, funded like the City Dionysia during the Peloponnesian War, might ask for $30 billion.

J. M. G. Le Clézio may have won the Nobel Prize for his fiction, but that does not make it a good idea to have disinterred his sixteen-year-old work on the history of Mexico. Felipe Fernández-Armesto takes a stern look at The Mexican Dream, a “warped and outdated” study which uncritically passes on colonial myths, including the claim that “the natives accepted the invaders as superior because they took them for gods”.

If Hitler’s Germans had succeeded in invading Britain, it is unlikely we would have awarded them divine status either, though possible that the Nazis would have liked us to. Andrew Roberts reviews the reissue of If Hitler Comes, a dystopian classic of “imaginary history” first published only two months after the fall of France.

Huge changes have been happening in the oil industry, many of them in the most inhospitable places on earth. The BP marketing dream of a world “Beyond Petroleum” was no more than a wishful fiction itself, as Tom Bower shows in his impressive narrative The Squeeze. For earlier life-and-death decisions in the Arctic wastes, readers may find inspiration, but not much comfort, in Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s review of Andrew Lambert’s Franklin: Tragic hero of polar exploration.

Peter Stothard

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