Homer
Dry retelling of the Odyssey – but Fiennes is ripped: The Return reviewed
Uberto Pasolini’s The Return stars Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in a retelling of the last section of Homer’s Odyssey.…
Were the Ancient Greeks shameless?
Last week Mary Wakefield discussed the virtues of her ‘Victorian’ education, designed to stiffen the upper lip of the young…
The bloody prequel
Following her translation of the Odyssey, Emily Wilson has turned her hand to the Iliad – and it is a triumph, writes A.E. Stallings
The waking nightmare
After years of insomnia, Marie Darrieussecq derives some comfort from finding herself in the company of Kafka, Kant, Proust, Dostoevsky, Borges and Plath
Rethinking Penelope
Problems about the misuse of history, especially on subjects such as race and colonialism, have been running for a long…
Top notes
We are experiencing a boom of popular books on Greek mythology: Stephen Fry’s Mythos; Natalie Haynes’s Pandora’s Jar; Liv Albert’s…
What really happened at Troy?
Heinrich Schliemann had always hoped he’d find Homer’s Troy. Although he had no archaeological background to speak of, he did…
John Flaxman is the missing link between superhero movies and Homer
As you enter the forecourt of the Royal Academy, you see them. A row of artistic titans, carved in stone,…
Homer’s Trojan War epic richly deserves its lavish new BBC adaptation
Did the Trojan War really take place? The Foreign Secretary certainly thinks so. ‘The Iliad must have happened,’ Boris Johnson…
Could the Odyssey have been the work of a woman after all?
Until recently, it seemed we were living in an age of Iliads. Since 2007, the ancient Homeric epic has been…
The greatest anti-war poem of all
The Iliad begins with a grudge and ends with a funeral. In between are passages, if not necessarily of boredom,…
Sex on legs
That joke about the young bull who tells the old bull, ‘Hey, Dad, see all those cows — let’s run…
Adventures on the isle that seduced Odysseus
Gozo — Malta’s tiny island neighbour — was once rather a crucial spot in the Mediterranean. The Knights of Malta…
Shopping and viewing
Some time in the 1960s, a group of people in an advertising agency (among them Llewelyn Thomas, son of Dylan)…
Corsica
Napoleon’s birthplace, Casa Buona-parte, in Ajaccio, Corsica’s capital, is pretty grand. It has high ceilings, generous, silk-lined rooms and a…
The art of celebrity
‘The Picture of the Prime Minister hangs above the Chimney of his own Closet, but I have seen that of…
Doubly unexpected
Stephen King’s latest novel, Mr Mercedes, is dedicated to James M. Cain and described as ‘a riveting suspense thriller’ —…
Homer in the theme park
A favourite game of mine is to imagine Virgil and Homer today, plying their trade among the supermarkets and office…
High life
Just before I left Gstaad for the Greek islands I went to dinner at Eugenie Radziwill’s, whose other guests included…
