A short life of Ethan Green

Ethan Green is a London-based writer and historical researcher whose work ranges across Classical antiquity, the Enlightenment and the cultural weather of contemporary Britain. He is, by temperament, an essayist: more comfortable with a long sentence than a short slogan, and more interested in arguments than in opinions.

His scholarly preoccupation is the breakdown of Roman democracy - the slow, often genteel decay by which a republic becomes something else. That work has been recognised with awards, and has spilled gratefully onto the stage in Stilicho's Last Rite: Eulogy to Rome, a play of which he is the scriptwriter. A parallel interest in the British Enlightenment shaped his time as a Fellow of the Common Sense Society, and a forthcoming paper takes him into the 1920s, where he is at work on the relationship between censorship and the rise of political extremism in Weimar Germany.

That public-facing instinct is older than his publications. As a sixteen-year-old at Southend High School for Boys he founded a debating society and pushed it through to the third stage of the Debating Matters Competition; at university he led the debating society and won a scholarship to represent it on the European circuit. He now sits on the national committee of the Speakeasy Group, organising open-platform debates around the country, and has been entrusted with judging the Debating Matters UK final at the House of Lords.

“Dedicated teachers gave me a love of learning. I have since had the good fortune to be invited back to my old school to lecture - and I count that among the proudest things I have done.”

Beyond his own writing he heads videography for the Pharos Foundation, has received prizes from the University of Exeter and the Common Sense Society, and is a familiar face on the Battle of Ideas / Academy of Ideas circuit. He also supports the Living Freedom activities of Ideas Matter, where he is a committed advocate of free speech and open debate.

All of which sounds, perhaps, more august than the man. Friends and colleagues attest to a tutor and conversationalist of genuine warmth - patient with students, courteous with opponents, and quietly delighted by a well-placed joke. It is from that humane register that everything on this site proceeds.

Read the essays →