In the past few years there has been a flourishing of literary responses to the Trojan war. To mention a few: Barry Unsworth’s elegant The Songs of the Kings enhanced the narrative with psychological flair; Alice Oswald’s beautifully distilled Memorial brought a disquieting focus on to the deaths of lesser heroes, as well as the electric beauty of the Homeric similes drawn from the natural world; and last year’s The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, which successfully imagined the Iliad with Agamemnon’s slave-girl as the narrator.