The classics professor and author on being inspired by Mary Douglas and terrified by Beatrix PotterMy earliest reading memoryWhen I was about four, my mother read me Beatrix Potter’s The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit. It was so scary (with the hunter’s …
The Women of Troy by Pat Barker review – bleak and impressive
In the sequel to her Iliad retelling The Silence of the Girls, told from the perspective of captured queen Briseis, Barker moves on from war to its aftermathTroy has fallen. Its warriors, even its unborn male babies, are all dead. The mutilated body of…
Just a Girl
An essay about Briseis’s story, and yours. The academic part of your brain knows that no text is about one thing. The Iliad is about a million things, but for you, right now, it’s really just a story about how women have to pay terrible prices for what…
‘The best summer of my life’ – Kae Tempest takes Sophocles on a gender odyssey
The writer has turned a Greek tragedy about a marooned soldier into an all-women play for the Covid era. They reveal how its creation mirrored their own journey‘These stories can be intimidating for so many reasons,” Kae Tempest says of the classical G…