Podcast review – Adam Nicolson’s The Mighty Dead
Listening time: 8 minutes.Enjoy this celebration of a favourite book by a favourite author about a favourite poet. Nicolson’s homage to Homer is a highly original take on the Iliad and the Odyssey, also providing fresh insights into the nature and continuing...
Sun-darkening arrows
Describing the shower of arrows at Thermopylae falling so thick and fast that they blot out the sun’s light. Leonidas, the Spartan king, fell with his men after a path around the pass they were defending was betrayed to the Persians. But for that betrayal it...
Relief of the gods
A gratitude, therefore, that the whole race or culture has not been wiped out even if the city has been razed; gratitude that one strong torch-bearer has escaped the flames with one essential flame burning, to light another place. The reader feels the kind of...
Sunlight dripping
Durrell’s various Greek island books and Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi enchanted me with their marvelous descriptions of people, places and the light of Greece. I was disappointed to have finished the last of them, Durrell’s Reflections on a Marine...
Stars like apples
Distant stars appearing so close you could reach up your hand and pick them, like apples in a tree. One of many lyrical descriptions in Golding’s 1955 Good-bye to Ithaca, which traces an Odyssean journey he has dreamt of for decades. The Cyclades were well...
Poems for my family 006 – Cavafy
This poem has been in my mental saddlebags for about a quarter of a century. I can’t remember how I came across it but after a few readings it imprinted itself on my memory. It’s by a Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), and draws on one of the...
Sheer from the sea
In 1916, in the middle of the First World War, Louis Golding sailed passed Ithaca. Minds were on other things than Homer and Odysseus, but this evocative statement about the island, uttered by a sailor on the boat deck, must have contributed to his long-delayed but...
The poet as compass
An enigmatic statement, perhaps born of the difficulty of pinning down Odysseus’ journey on a real map, although there is no shortage of claims that this bay, or that island, or those straits are unquestionably this, that or the other eventful point on his...
Bad news down the toilet
A kindly act by a local girl helping Lawrence Durrell with his housekeeping during his idyllic two year stay on the island of Rhodes immediately after the war. I consider her treatment of potentially bad news to be laudable, if inconvenient. Also love her reaction...
Piff paff
A conversation between Lawrence Durrell and a philosopher-fisherman called Manoli, during Durrell’s two year stint working for the British administration in Rhodes after the war. Manoli gives his views on the English as compared to the Greeks. I like his...
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 short period after the war when the Brits managed Rhodes. At one point the temporary administration decided to issue a new proclamation on...
A Greek showed up
Listening time: under 5 minutes. From Steinbeck’s masterful and lively account of travelling in the Soviet Union with Robert Capa. Chmarsky is their hapless interpreter who is pursued by a Kremlin gremlin, messing up many of his carefully orchestrated...
