the Trojan War
A death foretold: The Voyage Home, by Pat Barker, reviewed
Cassandra prophesies Agamemnon’s death as punishment for his crimes in Troy. But she knows that she too must share his fate -- since ‘you can’t cherry-pick prophecy’
Is there no end to the retelling of classical myths?
In the past few years there has been a flourishing of literary responses to the Trojan war. To mention a…
From the Iliad to the IRA: Country, by Michael Hughes, reviewed
Recently there has been a spate of retellings of the Iliad, to name just Pat Barker’s The Silence of the…
A woman’s version of the Trojan War
The Iliad begins with a grudge and ends with a funeral. In between are passages, if not necessarily of boredom,…
Gifts from beyond the grave — from Virgil and Seamus Heaney
Andrew Motion finds a touching parallel between Virgil’s unfinished Aeneid and Seamus Heaney’s barely finished translation of Book VI
Seamus Heaney: no shuffling or cutting — just turning over aces
The impersonator — Rory Bremner, Steve Coogan — speaks, in different voices, to a single primitive pleasure centre in his…
