What we can learn from 'Ozymandias'
In an extract from his book The Covid Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again , published over the summer in the Sunday Times Magazine , Richard Horton notes that: 'Our museums are filled with the relics of ancient peoples who once thought their societies were stable and robust. The fragility of our civilisations has been brought into start relief by Covid-19'. The reference to museums brought me straight back to one of my favourite sonnets, 'Ozymandias', which P.B. Shelley wrote in 1818 in competition with his friend Horace Smith, who composed a poem of the same name. Both poems were written (in part) in response to the news that the British Museum had acquired a fragment of a statue of Ramesses II from the thirteenth century BCE. But the title, 'Ozymandias', also referred to a passage from the writings of the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus , which described a massive Egyptian statue and quoted its inscription: "King of Ki