Marginal Comment: A Memoir Revisited

Marginal Comment, which attracted keen and widespread interest on its original publication in 1994, is the remarkable memoir of one of the most distinguished classical scholars of the modern era. Its author, Sir Kenneth Dover, whose academic publications included the pathbreaking book Greek Homosexuality (1978, reissued by Bloomsbury in 2016), conceived of it as an ‘experimental’ autobiography – ruthlessly candid in retracing the full range of the author’s experiences, both private and public, and unflinching in its attempt to analyse the entanglements between the life of the mind and the life of the body.

Dover’s distinguished career involved not only an influential series of writings about the ancient Greeks but also a number of prominent positions of leadership, including the presidencies of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and the British Academy. It was in those positions that he became involved in several high-profile controversies, including the blocking of an honorary degree for Margaret Thatcher from Oxford University, and a bitter debate in the British Academy over the fellowship of Anthony Blunt after his exposure as a former Soviet spy.

This edition of Marginal Comment is much more than a reissue: it includes an introduction which frames the book in relation to its author’s life and work, as well as annotations based in part on materials originally excluded by Dover but left in his personal papers on this death. Now newly available, the memoir provides not only the self-portrait of an exceptional individual but a rich case-study in the intersections between an intellectual life and its social contexts.