Limentinus
Rituals, change and the dignity of small things.
Category: Popular culture
This section explores themes, ideas, and stories about in what can be described as popular culture. Expect a mix of context, commentary, and connections presented in a clear and engaging way.
-
Most of us like to imagine we’re perfectly capable of steering our own lives, right up until the moment we find ourselves standing in the middle of a decision, staring at it like a cow confronted with a gate. It’s usually at this point that someone offers advice. Sometimes it is wise, sometimes it’s useless,…
-
Public health officials have once again emerged from their committee rooms to announce that, no, there will be no national screening programme for prostate cancer. The evidence is “uncertain”, the benefits “modest”, and the harms “not fully understood”. It’s a familiar refrain, delivered with impeccable calm, although it sits uneasily beside the far more generous…
-
Step a little away from the beach at Yaverland and the whole place changes. The noise falls behind you, the air sharpens, and the chalk downs open out in a quiet, sun‑struck sweep. Wild thyme and rock‑rose cling low to the turf, skylarks rise into the blue, and stonechats flick their tails from the gorse…
-
This essay examines the development of narrative within American Gay adult media from a cultural and historical perspective. Studios, performers, and eras are mentioned for clarity, but no links are provided. The aim is analysis rather than promotion, with a focus on how the industry reflects wider American ideas about masculinity, identity, and commodification. You…
-
Matthew Shepard’s story carries the shape of a modern passion narrative, not because any church would openly claim him for themselves, but because his suffering exposed the world’s cruelty with a clarity that doctrine can’t manufacture. His death drew the old gestures of sanctity, candles, vigils, quiet processions, the same instinct that once led English…
-
There’s something wonderfully steadying about taking your cues from people who never existed. Fictional characters don’t wake up one morning and reveal they’ve been part of some grubby conspiracy, or quietly supporting the worst people imaginable. They stay exactly as they’re written, principled, consistent, untainted by human chaos. You are here: Home › Contents ›…
-
A Tent, A Cough, and Questionable Life Choices is a small chronicle of camping misadventures across Britain and beyond, the sort of trips undertaken with more optimism than sense. It’s a story of damp mornings, dubious health, and the stubborn belief that pitching a tent in another country will somehow be character‑building. A gently mocking…
-
Male prostitution in ancient Rome was woven into the city’s daily life, from the heat of the Subura to the steam of the bathhouses. Behind the trade lay a vast slave economy that treated human beings as commodities. You are here: Home › Contents › Male Prostitution in Ancient Rome: the Human Cost Male Prostitution…
-
Where My Writing Likes to Wander is a small map of the mind’s favourite detours, the places, periods and odd corners of history I keep circling back to. Saints, ruins, lost kings, moral puzzles, the Isle of Wight, the Romans, and the occasional philosophical grumble. It’s less a plan than a pattern, the routes my…
-
A Roman dinner party was less a meal than a public performance of status, restraint, and carefully curated Romanitas. You are here: Home › Contents › How to Behave at a Roman Dinner Party How to Behave at a Roman Dinner Party (Especially when the host is ambitious, provincial, and a little too eager to…