How long are you about for? We should try to meet up.

Pretty depressing if you ask me. Asylum seekers are treated as if they're not much different from tourists, and I gave up when they started trying to redefine 'inhumane treatment'.

And what did Noem think of Mahmood? Probably just "oh, she's brown."

I often wonder if Kemi Badenoch realises she is pushing her own deportation.

Clearly someone thought, "If we have a Muslim say this, it'll sound less racist and cruel." They were, as so often, utterly wrong.

A particularly deaf photo sub at work, there.

But the satrapies he's given control over - Lydia, Greater Phrygia, and Cappadocia - and the fact that he's not given authority over Hellespontine Phrygia, says to me that Cyrus' main task must be to deal with some crisis in central Anatolia of which we are otherwise ignorant.

It distorts how we think about so much regarding the Achaemenids. E.g. people still write that Cyrus the Younger's main mission was to recover the Aegean Greek cities, because that's the aspect of his activity that the Greeks were interested in.

I regularly used to use that David Lewis quote about how it was too easy for the Greeks then, and too easy for Greek historians now, to imagine that the Persian Basileus had nothing to think about but Greek problems. I tried to keep that in mind in everything I wrote about the Achaemenids.

I mean, that's a real 'Other kings said I were mad to build a cathedral in a swamp' moment.