Extraordinary , Jesus or not .sx Jonathan Keates .sx AT THE heart of American academic life lies a singular paradox .sx Outwardly the apparatus , voluminous libraries , bulging archives , foundations , endowments , university presses , looks magnificent , especially to the British , citizens of a country in which openly-articulated contempt for higher education has now become an article of faith .sx Yet a creeping timidity seems to paralyse its operators , numbed by the apparently limitless prospect of causing offence to somebody or other through the merest word or sign .sx The results of this bizarre climate of fear , created by raucous and implacable special-interest caucuses lying in ambush along the scholar's path , include a terminological pussyfooting whereby familiar labels are altered for the sake of dubious peacekeeping .sx One of the more preposterous examples of this involves replacing the initials AD and BC with CE and BCE , " Common Era " and " Before Common Era " .sx Not merely are both terms in themselves meaningless - " common " to whom or what ?sx - but by preserving the before-and-after distinction they undermine the point of the change intended to preserve non-Christians from sullying contact with the name of Jesus .sx William Klingaman is a convinced CE man , though ironically his tour of the First Century AD reminds us that there was nothing common about this era .sx Indeed , if one had to choose an age in which practically every event or personality was in some way extraordinary , this would unquestionably be it .sx A century which bundled together Ovid , Caligula , Agrippina and St John the Divine could hardly go wrong .sx That even its least attractive figures have since achieved a certain tainted glamour is largely due to the accomplished professionalism of contemporary historians , Tacitus , Suetonius and the rest , whose work underlines the embarrassing truth that the historiography which gives most pleasure is invariably the most prejudiced .sx As BC became AD , the Emperor Augustus , fretting over a successor , recalled Tiberius from self-imposed exile in Rhodes and sent him to lead a campaign against the fractious Germans .sx In Rome itself , to appease the gods who had harried the city with floods and food shortages , the ailing Caesar bombarded moral decadence with a sequence of draconian decrees , criminalising adultery , forcing men under 60 and woman under 50 to marry and produce children on pain of forfeiting their inheritable property , and rewarding philoprogenitive families with special privileges and tax incentives .sx When Ovid dared to mock imperial hypocrisy he was banished to Tomi on the Black Sea , where the Danube delta froze solid in winter , icicles formed in men's beads and the stupid Goths , laughing at his Latin , encouraged him to make poems in their own barbarous tongue .sx More or less at the same time a small boy , whose Galilean parents had taken him to Jerusalem for Passover , went missing in the Temple and was found by his distraught mother sitting at the feet of learn e d rabbis , immersed in discussion of the Law .sx Klingaman presents the mature Saviour as an eccentric swimmer against the prevailing tide of Jewish militancy ; not a knife-brandishing zealot or a freedom fighter like the die - hards of Masada , but an heir to the anti-materialist millenarism of John the Baptist , a visionary eccentric with a following of dropouts and no-hopers , dealing in circus-act miracles and allegorical conundrums .sx This is one of those 'meanwhile' narratives whose chapters lurch dramatically from one end of the world to the other , not quite , but very nearly , a case of 'from China to Peru' , with the Chinese sections made all the more absorbing through a combination of their sheer unfamiliarity with Klingaman's gift for lucid exposition .sx There is as much heady delight to be gained from the tale of Ma Yan , 'General Who Calms the Waves' , trouncing the Vietnamese virago Trung Trac and turning her bronze drums into a horse , as there is from the story of the hubristic Wang Kang , whose concubines were graded as Harmonious Ladies , Spouses , Beauties and Attendants , but who ended up as a severed head stuck on a pole .sx Klingaman , marshalling and sifting his sources with considerable deftness , is entertaining but never irresponsible , yet finally there appears little point to a book of this kind save to impress on us the significance of these impacted episodes and .sx a hundred-year span .sx His retelling of the catastrophic annihilation of Quintilus Varus's sic !sx legions by Germanic tribesmen in the forest of Westphalia is as graphic as the account , several chapters later , Boadicea's revolt , yet neither achieves the austere detachment and lethal suavity of tone for which we willingly return to the Roman historians .sx No conclusions are drawn , we are required to grasp no meaningful parallels .sx As the sort of history which could be reliably offered to an inquiring teenager , The First Century works splendidly , but something more striking is needed to bring home to us the peculiar uncommonness with which our Common Era began .sx Post-revolution treasure trove .sx Music .sx Nicholas Kenyon on a Russian spring at the South Bank .sx THERE is something ironic in the South Bank centre launching its Russian Spring festival at a time when a chilly winter is enveloping Russia's artistic life .sx The possibility of the strongly characterful developments of the past few years being thrown away by economic deprivation and political turmoils is all too real .sx Increasingly , however , Russian artists and composers are turning their eyes to Western Europe as their main source of activity and support .sx Freedom to travel combined with lack of opportunity at home means that there is plenty of very important work for our promoters to explore for the first time .sx The Huddersfield and Almeida festivals have already made successful presentations of the work of younger Russian composers , and there has been the astounding Schnittke festival which with the artists of the calibre of Gidon Kremer and Yuri Bashmet , drew enthusiastic crowds to the Barbican .sx Now , the South Bank has assembled its own festival in which , however , the younger generation features less strongly than might have been expected .sx Later in the month , there will be new works from Elena Firsova and Dimitri Smirnov , as well as the long-overdue first London performance of Sofia Gubaidulina's fine Offertorium .sx But the emphasis in this springtime festival falls much more heavily on those who awakened Russian music from its romantic slumbers after the revolution :sx Stravinsky , Prokofiev ( whose centenary is conveniently subsumed in the celebrations ) , and the shadowy figure of Nikolai Roslavets , whose achievement has been forgotten for half a century .sx In the festival's opening weekend there was even Tchaikovsky , as the wellspring of the Russian romantic soul , ensuring good houses for a pair of concerts that also featured Schnittke ( from the London Philharmonic ) and Denisov ( from the BBC Symphony Orchestra) .sx Tchaikovsky's neurotically intense achievement in uniting symphonic form with nationalist sentiment can scarcely be overestimated in the history of Russian music , and indeed one feature of this series will be to emphasise the continuity of that folk music-based tradition right through Stravinsky's own spring - though a little Rimsky-Korsakov would have made the point even better .sx Edison Denisov is fascinating among contemporary Russian composers , a mild but forceful godfather figure whose house has provided a treasure trove of scores , tapes , records and discussions both for the younger generation and for visitors from abroad .sx But I have never quite felt that his music lives up to his undeniably positive influence .sx Peinture , which was the only work new to this country in the opening weekend at the Festival Hall , was more than two decades old , and although its sound patterns were woven with evident skill and a wonderful ear for passing colour , it was difficult to feel that at this point it had anything major to say .sx The BBC Symphony Orchestra played responsively for Andrew Davis ( they also shone last Thursday , at the Festival Hall in a convincing revival of Hugh Wood's passionate 1982 Symphony) .sx And everyone was brought to life by Dimitri Sitkovetsky's razor-sharp account of Shostakovich's Second Violin Concerto .sx But even Sitkovetsky's ideal mixture of deep tone and rhythmic incisiveness did not change my feeling that this is one of the most unsatisfactory and unconvincing of Shostakovich's pieces , where a clever and actively decorative style covers up a depressingly blank centre .sx In a varied week , it was the Orchestra of the Age of Englightenment's revival of Beethoven's complete incidental music to Egmont , at the Elizabeth Hall , that lingered in the mind :sx superbly resourceful music which we rarely hear because of the awkwardness of finding a concert format within which to perform it .sx Which is not to say that the solution adopted here , of a narrator reading a text-book version of Goethe's plot assembled with all the flair of an entry for Grove's Dictionary , really did the trick .sx But Nancy Argenta's singing of the songs was so delightful and the overall quality of the dark , brooding music so high that the project was a triumph .sx In the short melodrama , where speech is heard over music , Goethe's own poetic language was briefly sensed , and one could see what attracted Mozart as well as Beethoven to this unique expressive form of speech-and-music .sx Mozart at one point , indeed , suggested that he would always compose melodrama instead of recitative :sx he never did anything so radical , but the melodramas he composed for the unfinished Zaide , recently heard in the Mozart 200 series at the Barbican , were powerfully inventive .sx The orchestra of the Age of Englightenment , playing here under the impassioned direction of Ivan Fischer , were on exciting form .sx Monica Huggett , risking a great deal by tackling Beethoven's technically advanced Violin concerto on a period instrument , drew out all the French-inspired delicacy and refinement of the work .sx Darting pairs of wind instruments , an eloquent bassoon , horns chirruping under the bouncing violin lines :sx the chamber style of the performance seemed exactly right for the venue .sx This is not one of Beethoven's heaven-storming pieces , but one directly inspired by the then new achievement of the French violin school , and this performance matched that character very accurately .sx I didn't enjoy the Old Vic Carmen Jones quite as much as my colleague Michael Coveney , though I must say I was pleasantly surprised by the piece itself :sx clever orchestrations , splendidly played by the pit band under that by no means negligible conductor Henry Lewis , and ingenious reworkings of the lyrics to fit Bizet's ever-fresh music .sx But the production found its punch only in the choreography , and the characterisations were lacking in grit :sx indeed the whole story line fatally sentimentalises Bizet's opera .sx From the first cast of the two which will share the run , there was high-class singing from Wilhelmina Fernandez as Carmen and Damon Evans , though the latter was a milk-and-water Jos e .sx As a son-of- Porgy and Bess , the show seemed less than substantial .sx And is amplification , particularly of such a crude nature , really necessary in such a perfect little theatre as the Old Vic ?sx Electronic intrusion between singer and audience is going to become an ever greater issue as opera and musicals become inextricably intertwined .sx Caribbean orange juice .sx First novels .sx Boyd Tonkin .sx DISENCHANTMENT came quickly to the Caribbean diaspora .sx As early as 1954 , George Lamming's novel The Emigrants gave a voice to West Indian dismay at the gap between the bleak streets of the real England and the imperial fairyland conjured up in tropical schoolrooms .sx Elean Thomas , writing about the same period and process in The Last Room ( Virago , pounds13 .sx 99 ) , has her heroine smuggle two Seville oranges from Jamaica through customs at Heathrow .sx Once in Birmingham , the bitter-sweet fruit " shrivelled up , lost their juice , became crisp , dry and hard " .sx In the eyes of her clan , bright young Putus will shut the door on the " last room " of their colonial prison .sx Though her mother insists that " you wi be de Barton who true lef' slavery back-a-door " , emigration pushes her fast into a deepening nightmare of hardship and insult .sx Her own daughter Icylane , fostered in a Jamaica where reggae and tourism have ousted cane-cutting and rural folkways , makes the trip to England to save Putus from a freezing bedsit and a mind racked by taunting inner voices .sx 'Icy' hangs out with Rastafarian musicians and has a skin " black as midnight " ; her mother despises her " lowclass " Jamaican neighbours and remembers the royal visits of her childhood .sx