A Classical Archaeologist’s Life: The Story so Far: An Autobiography

John Boardman grew up in Essex with the Second World War interrupting school life and nights spent in air-raid shelters. After Cambridge came Greece and excavation at Smyrna and Knossos, then Oxford: first the Ashmolean Museum and later a professorship in classical archaeology and art.

Boardman is known for his work on Greek art, but his autobiography is not simply a record of research and publications. Family, friends, travel, houses and even cars share the pages with excavations, museums, colleagues and the business of writing books. He is just as willing to recall the ordinary shape of a life as the scholarship that made his name; there is room for both the Parthenon and getting older.