A Drink with David Stronach

I was happy to see David Stronach on Friday evening 20 November 2015 in the ASOR hotel bar in Atlanta. We sat for a while with drinks (not port), and I outlined the autobiography project. He told me he was writing autobiographical essays and that one had appeared in BackDirt. He was whisked off to a dinner with friends, I to other matters. Later in the evening I found the article.

Max [Mallowan]—careful not to neglect the education of a junior assistant in one of the finer points of life—also once surprised me at the end of one especially good dinner by suddenly producing a bottle of port. At that same moment he asked, “David, do you know how to feed a Stilton?” I confessed that I did not. “Like this,” said he, all the while decanting a quantity of fine port into what was still left of the majestic Stilton.

Stronach, David. “Max Mallowan and Agatha Christie Mallowan: Some Memories from Iraq and Iran.” Backdirt: Annual Review of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, December 2014, 68–76.