To browse Academia. Marginal Comment, which attracted keen and widespread interest on its original publication in , 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, conceived of it as an 'experimental' autobiography-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 influential writings, prominent positions of leadership, and 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 reprint: it includes a substantial introduction by Stephen Halliwell which discusses both the book's genesis and its controversial reception, as well as numerous annotations based in part on materials originally excluded by Dover but left in his personal papers at his death. Now newly available, the memoir provides a rich case-study in the intersections between an intellectual life and its social contexts.
Dover was by any standards a brave scholar. To write the cultural history of human sexuality in a far away moment, having already attempted that of popular morality, was bold, and it remains a fraught topic. Such changes included freeing-up of the censorship laws, especially in the s. In the transforming popular culture, it went side by side with the Women's Liberation movement of the same period Germaine Greer's Female Eunuch was published in , itself not unrelated to the licensing of the contraceptive pill in in America and in Britain.
That these should include the work of Foucault as well as that of numerous classicists, 11 has meant that Dover's project stands at the epicentre of some of the most important work in the humanities in the last half century, across all disciplines. Dover's art history stands at the empirical base of the entirety of that collective project, which makes the topic significant well beyond a centenary celebration of his scholarly achievements.
Dover rightly saw that literary evidence was insufficient to his theme and the visual materials were key. Stephen Halliwell and Christopher Stray , Halliwell and C. In a article in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Anna Clark put forward a methodology for analyzing the identity of Anne Lister, an early nineteenth-century Yorkshire landowner, diarist, and self-professed lover of only her own sex.
