Four good men
Hemingway’s protagonist goes recruiting and chooses quality over quantity. Trust is what sorts the good men from the ‘undependables’. ‘I could use twenty more men, to be sure,’ Robert Jordan said.‘Good ones do not exist. You want...
Sing what you cannot say
In January 1942, a score of Verdi’s Requiem was smuggled into Theresienstadt concentration camp and performed by prisoners, conducted by Rafael Schäcter.Starting with about 150 singers, the numbers dwindled as they disappeared into this or that hellish ending....
Like a burst of hope
A heartening simile in a vivid, gripping narrative of humans ground between the shifting tectonic plates of contradictory but equally totalitarian ideologies. There is neither much sunshine nor hope in the book, but such hope as there is is tenacious and connected to...
Beware the Idomeneus spear
Famed with good reason – see his bringing another warrior to meet his ‘dark-named destiny’. However, the most graphic and distressing spearing I recall from the Iliad is by Patroclus, Achilles’ great pal. And that’s before we let loose...
Voice communications
Consider the vital role of the herald before mechanical forms of broadcast, and how important the quality and strength of their voice. Here, like leaders before and for millennia after, Agamemnon relies on heralds to summon his men. Another age-old though unlamented...
Bronze-armoured Achaians
The Trojan war was a Bronze Age affair, magnificently evoked in different sea-surrounded places by two books of Adam Nicolson. His Sea Room touches on the Bronze Age in a remote island off the coast of Scotland, while Why Homer Matters brings it into vivid view in...
Strategic consideration
The wild card of ancient Greek military planning was the existence and randomness of divine intervention. You never knew which god was backing your enemy, or when or how they might suddenly rouse themselves in wrath and take destructive action against you. Hence, the...
On pointless hatred
In with the gore and glory of Homer’s war-words, there are repeated expressions of sorrow at human hatred. ‘Soul-perishing’ echoes our more commonly used ‘soul-destroying’. Either way, to be avoided if possible. See other such pleas by...
Heart-breaking hostilities
Homer’s Iliad pulsates with war and violence, sometimes wrapped in glory but often shrouded as much in sorrow. Here, hostility and quarrel are portrayed as heart-breaking, or as we might say, soul-destroying. The second stretch simile is particularly a plea...
Wood and war
I liked these two woody similes for war and death, the first to convey the din and crash of battle, the second to describe the mortal felling of a great warrior. Homer’s stretch-similes are an exercise in holding an unfolding image in your mind until he lands...
Wasps quick-bending
One of the many stretch metaphors used by Homer. When you see a comma followed by ‘as …’ it can be a signal to take a good intake of breath to carry you through to the end of the image. Here it is feisty bees and quick-bending wasps who convey the...
Dark-named destiny
Another term for death, the fate of Asios who, horse-proud, insisted on driving his chariot into the fray where he met a Trojan spear. See also the bestellar reviews, complete with rich quote-mosaics, of Adam Nicolson’s magnificent Why Homer Matters, and...
