Charlotte Higgins's Top Book Recommendations

Charlotte HigginsCatullus was a Roman poet who lived from about 84 to 54 BC, so he was a younger contemporary of Julius Caesar. There are poems that are funny and obscene, there are poems that are astonishingly beautiful and delicate, there are angry, hot, throbbing poems about loss, there are charming poems about his home and family, there are poems that are incredibly learned – almost T S Eliot-like in their... (Source)

Charlotte HigginsWell, she was admired in antiquity for the delicacy and elegance of her verse, and this is quite right – it’s just pitch-perfect. She talks about love as being bittersweet – such a cliché but she was almost certainly the first person to coin this expression that everyone can understand…..In classical antiquity and later she was massively valued as a poet. In the Great Library in Alexandria there... (Source)

Charlotte HigginsIt’s a beautiful book, illustrated with line drawings by Elisabeth Frink. I love the way Kenneth McLeish doesn’t sweeten the pill. A lot of these stories are quite gruesome and unpleasant, involving humans – and indeed immortals – coming to grisly ends. I remember when I was at school being asked to write a creation story in RE and, budding classicist that I was at age 11, I trotted off to my... (Source)

Ted TurnerWhen I got to college, I was a classics major, and that was mainly the study of Greek - and to a lesser extent Roman - history and culture, and that fascinated me: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid by Virgil. (Source)

Max PorterI still have an image of Odysseus in my head from when I was a child – he’s very Anglo-Saxon and stubbly, a bit like Michael Fassbender (Source)

Janine di GiovanniThe thing I loved about Ulysses was that he’s so in love with adventure and with love. (Source)

Ted TurnerWhen I got to college, I was a classics major, and that was mainly the study of Greek - and to a lesser extent Roman - history and culture, and that fascinated me: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid by Virgil. (Source)

John GittingsHomer, like Shakespeare, encompassed all humanity in his work, and in The Iliad he encompasses peace as well as war. (Source)

Kate McLoughlinA lot of people who had public school educations, classical educations, might have gone into the First World War thinking that they were fighting Homer’s war. (Source)