It’s the Easter Monday bank holiday here, and this somewhat self-indulgent series comes to an end. Tomorrow real life is put on hold, and I must go back to work.
I picked up the Sources Chrétiennes edition and translation of Cyril of Alexandria Against Julian the Apostate, although only books 1 and 2 were done. The French translation is lively and easy to read, and this impelled me to translate some more of book 2. In it Cyril makes some interesting statements about what Genesis does NOT contain, and for whom Moses was writing. It’s an interesting work. Sadly the translator Prof. Paul Burguière passed on in 2000, so we need expect no more.
The other thing that I did today was address the Google Books problem. This is where out of copyright material is invisible to people in the United Kingdom, purely because Google bars access. But the problem can be circumvented if you can anonymise your web connection. Indeed the techniques are just the same as those for getting past web censorship. However I have now raised the issue in a couple of fora; who, precisely, benefits from UK readers being unable to see stuff in Google Books? Senior academics regularly dine with government ministers, so this is a problem that can be fixed. I’ve had a bit of a go, anyway!