Hopelessly insane: Homer fans
Here Christopher Logue highlights the sheer vital durability of Homer and the magnitude of such sustainability, kept alive through a...
Bronze-armoured Achaians
The Trojan war was a Bronze Age affair, magnificently evoked in different sea-surrounded places by two books of Adam Nicolson....
Cobalt polar lapis blue
A dazzlingly variegated Greek sky. It was under such a sky, which for me also includes hyacinth blue and lilac,...
Do what a hero must
Naturally, any would-be hero or heroine needs to set sail, or how are they to prove their worth? Clive James,...
Foes and friends
Here, the Trojan hero Hector addresses the Greek Ajax in friendship. There is a number of heart- prefixed triologisms in...
Summary impatience
I liked this sharp injunction to Dante to hurry up and spit it out. You can imagine an impatient parent...
As the falcon flies
Even the rhythm of this simile conveys something of a great bird's single, confident swoop to land precisely on a...
And this is my epic…
Listening time: under 4 minutes.
A marvelous account of a butcher bursting in to Lawrence Durrell's office during...
The sin of fence-sitting
Clearly, sitting on the fence, hedging your bets, watching which way the wind blows, is a sin which leads to...
Too much information
Dante anticipated the age in which we are drowned in facts, fake and otherwise. Note his observation of our being...
Zeus dispenses with practicalities
Zeus here neatly rebuffs his daughter Athene's requests. I like his suitably arch reaction, which puts all supplicants in their...
The urge of bees
A charming way to convey the genesis of ideas or desires, likening them to the urge of bees to make...
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