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Merrills, Andy

Andy Merrills teaches Ancient History at the University of Leicester. He has written extensively on the history and archaeology of North Africa.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [30] 7; [34] 79; [38] 7; [43] 56; [55] 65; [58] 90; [65] 69; [69] 20; [81] 74

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20240301093041 Andy-Merrills-on-George-R.-Stewart,-Slightly-Foxed-81

A Gale Called Maria

Andy Merrills on George R Stewart, Storm

I first learned about the concept of the ‘pathetic fallacy’ when I was doing my A levels three decades ago. The furious winds that tore through Wuthering Heights – or across the playing fields of my school in Sheffield – were not actually furious, our teacher helpfully explained, because they were inanimate and so could not be given human characteristics. We diligently took note of the fact that weather was often described in this way, and trusted that if we successfully identified this during our summer exams we could expect to gain some valuable additional marks. As with so much at school, I never entirely understood the significance of the phrase, but it stuck with me. And it came to mind again when I read George R. Stewart’s extraordinary novel Storm (1941) for the first time.
20210915094736 Foxed Pod Episode 35 | Decline and Fall: A Literary Guide

Episode 35: Decline and Fall: A Literary Guide

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

The Dark Ages, Late Antiquity, the late Roman . . . however you define the years spanning the fall of Rome, the period is rich in stories, real or reimagined. In this episode Dr Andy Merrills, Associate Professor of Ancient History, joins the Slightly Foxed team to cast light on the surviving literature. We begin with Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire before delving into 4th-century accounts by the Latin historian Ammianus Marcellinus, a spiritual autobiography by Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, ecclesiastical chronicles by the Venerable Bede, Gallic tales of Christian miracles and relic-looting with Gregory of Tours and an alternative look at the period with the modern-day master of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown. From there we venture into fiction with Rosemary Sutcliff’s adventures inspired by archaeological finds, a retelling of the old British folk ballad ‘The Twa Sisters’ in Lucy Holland’s Sistersong and much more besides . . .
20200301162331

A Frank Look at History

Andy Merrills on Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks

I am a book annotator. Of course I never write in the margins of library books, and I wouldn’t dream of marking books lent by a well-meaning friend: I’m a book annotator, not a sociopath. But a pencilled note or punctuation mark in the margin of my own books is a form of ownership, a tiny graphite beacon for future browsing and (on occasion) an aid to concentration. Most of these notes are unobtrusive – a line here, an asterisk there – but there is one book that I own which is annotated to the point of deranged excess: the Penguin Classic by Gregory of Tours, entitled The History of the Franks and translated by Lewis Thorpe.
20120601111243

The Liquid Plains of the Sea

Andy Merrills on Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II

An enthusiastic bibliophile in a certain frame of mind could construct quite a library made up entirely of books that were written in prison. The poetry section would have the esoteric colour of Le Morte d’Arthur and Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos; political thought would be unusually well stocked, with The Consolation of Philosophy and The Prince vying for attention with Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks; and those with an off-beat sense of humour might enjoy the juxtaposition of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress with John Cleland’s Fanny Hill. For me, though, the particular highlight of the library would be the history section, in which pride of place would certainly be granted to Fernand Braudel’s monumental work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949).
20180601123006 Beards: An Omnium Gatherum - Andy Merrills on Reginald Reynolds

Hair Today and Gone Tomorrow

Andy Merrills on Reginald Reynolds, Beards: An Omnium Gatherum

Five or six summers ago, I was browsing in a shabbily genteel second-hand bookstore in a university town somewhere in the middle of the United States. The shop had a substantial stock of fiction, a generous and eclectic supply of non-fiction and the sort of haphazard shelving policy which actively demands exploration. I cannot now remember which section I was in when I discovered Reginald Reynolds’s extraordinary Beards: An Omnium Gatherum (1949). I’m pretty sure it wasn’t in fiction, but beyond that it could have been anywhere . . .
20170901154827 Anna Trench - Andy Merrills on Alan Bradley, Flavia de Luce

Not So Cosy After All?

Andy Merrills on Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce novels

On the face of it, crimes don’t get much cosier than those which appear in the first six novels of the Flavia sequence. The convention of Slightly Foxed dictates that titles are normally tucked away in a footnote, but I think it is worth savouring the delightful cadence of all six here: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie; The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag; A Red Herring without Mustard; I Am Half-Sick of Shadows; Speaking from among the Bones and The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches. To me, each of these seems to have exactly the right balance of whimsy and menace, and these are promises that are admirably fulfilled in the books that follow.
20130601115744 Mark Handley, Andrew Merrills, Patrick Leigh Fermor

A Great Adventure

Andy Merrills on Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts; Between the Woods and the Water

In late December 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on foot for Constantinople (as he anachronistically termed it). Recently expelled from school for the unpardonable crime of holding hands with a local girl, and insufficiently inspired by the prospect of Sandhurst and a career of peacetime soldiering, the 19-year-old decided to head east on foot. His backpack was evidently stuffed to the brim, with a greatcoat, jerseys, shirts (including white linen ones for dressy occasions), puttees, nailed boots, a selection of stationery, a copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse and the first volume of the Loeb Horace.
20110601123641 Andy Merrills, Alfred Wainwright - Slightly Foxed Issue 30

A Personal Landscape

Andy Merrills on Alfred Wainwright

Every reader of Wainwright will have his or her favourite passages: if nothing else the sequence is a monument to the self-effacing whimsy of a modest man. Enthusiasts point to the dedications of the different volumes, for example – The Eastern Fells ‘to the men of the Ordnance Survey’, The Southern Fells ‘to the sheep of Lakeland’, The North Western Fells ‘to those unlovely twins, my right leg and my left leg. Staunch supporters which have carried me about for over half a century, endured without complaint. And never once let me down.’ Again and again, the lovingly pastoral tone is enlivened by a wry (and occasionally macabre) humour.

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