Some thirty years ago, the distinguished early modern historian and acclaimed popularizer, J. H. (now Sir Jack) Plumb, responded to what he perceived to be a ‘crisis in the humanities’ by editing a volume of essays under that title. Somewhat paradoxically, perhaps, he included therein a typically astringent and comparative but also firmly optimistic essay on ‘Classics’ by his Cambridge colleague Moses (later Sir Moses) Finley, a no less distinguished pedagogue. Finley's optimism stemmed chiefly from his belief that Classics would survive by being transformed, into non-philological (or not primarily philological) ‘Classical Studies’ or ‘Classical Civilization’. A quarter of a century later, despite – or because of? – the immense growth in the popularity and influence of non-linguistic Classical Civilization (or Classical Studies, Classics in Translation) courses in both schools and universities, not to mention among the wider public, a group of leading academics on the other side of the Atlantic combined to produce Classics: a Discipline and a Profession in Crisis?, the terminal interrogative neatly encapsulating the ambiguity both of ‘Classics’ and of ‘crisis’ (everything going wrong – or moment of decision).

Since 1989, the situation of Classics, and the Humanities more generally, may be thought to have become if anything yet more politically fraught. No longer is the talk merely of ‘crisis’.