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“... after Metamorphoses, Book VIII I knew about Helen, they kept selling me Helen, but I never even got to be stolen in the first place. Sieges are boring – did you know. Everything’s fine, just each day’s a little bit worse than the last. And you start thinking how long it is since you saw prawns or a nice pair of earrings or a magazine ...”

“... from the knight who is questioning him, as it indicates high status. He determines to go to King Arthur and get himself made a knight. Before he sets out, his mother gives him instructions on how to behave in the world, and tells him something of his own history how his father and brothers were killed in combat and she had withdrawn to the forest to ...”

“... off poems of congratulation to his former pupil. Within three years he was back at court, as king’s orator. In addition to his official duties, he produced further poems of praise, lament and vituperation, the latter often in the form of ‘flytings’, the object of which was to be as insulting to an enemy or rival as the wit could manage. They ...”

“... Modernists such as Picasso begot paper collage, wood assemblage and metal sculpture. ‘I’m king of the ragpickers!’ Picasso proclaimed gleefully around 1930, after he had created Woman in a Garden, his first welded tin and scrap iron sculpture, proof that machines and Tin Can Alley do not ‘rule the world’, as Leopold Bloom laments over noisy ...”

“... flagrant contravention of the Second Commandment. But it’s much less obvious why Dr Faustus or King Lear, As You Like It or Volpone, should come under the same ban. O’Connell never does come up with a final answer; but his quest constitutes one of the most interesting explorations yet made, not just of the theology of the theatre, but of the connections ...”

“... level of discourse is often villainous low – ‘cunt-struck Agamemnon!’ says Achilles to the King, ‘O cheesy Lung’). But what follows is pure Logue. Nestor pays a visit to Achilles in his tent and in a long speech that has tiny particles of Homer from different contexts woven into the invented whole, tries to persuade Achilles to relent, to rejoin ...”

“... Helen Castor describes She-Wolves as ‘an attempt to write the kind of book I loved to read before history became my profession as well as my pleasure. It is about people, and about power. It is a work of storytelling, of biographical narrative rather than theory or cross-cultural comparison.’ At the heart of the book are accounts of the careers of four women who ‘ruled England before Elizabeth ...”

“... they changed, overnight, the language in which they had all lived together. Elena was now Helen, Mummy not Mami; Papa became Daddy; the boys were still Donald and Peter, of course, but they had far fewer words at their disposal by which to express themselves. They were now British – British refugees, to be exact – not just because their identity ...”

“... almost all-knowing superiority, acts as pander to his father, Zeus, and enables him to seduce Helen, the beautiful wife of Adam Godley’s son, Adam. Zeus comes to her in the shape of her husband, but with a divine potency that makes the encounter seem a dream. This Helen, as we are never allowed to forget, is a golden ...”

“... game (c.535 BC). Of course the actual Troy has always existed alongside another Troy, the Troy of Helen, of the horse, of the war, of the imaginaire. Thankfully it’s mostly the imaginary Troy that is the subject of the BM’s exhibition. It begins with two top-quality artworks: a smooth salmon-buff amphora from around 530 bc, painted by the black-figure ...”

“... artist – sometimes, like himself, they seem smaller than a mastiff, sometimes larger than their King and Queen; and these perspectives release them from the indignity of their normal social selves. A Keats poem too may have liberating perspectives. The ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is much liked by most people who read any poetry at all, yet it is not obvious ...”

“... especially technical words, regardless of the language. Chaucer, taking over as clerk of the king’s works, was given an inventory of dead stock at the Tower of London that included ‘i ramme cum toto apparatu excepta i drawying corda que frangitur et devastatur, i fryingpanne, i lathe pro officio carpentarii’: a battering-ram with a winding-cord too ...”

“... is, without puffing a sail loose. An introduction is an introduction, not a nomination. ‘This is Helen Hoho, she teaches at Heehaw,’ is quite enough. Not: ‘This is Helen Hoho, and despite what you have heard, she isn’t bad in bed, is rather good with pilaff, and can darn cotton socks like crazy.’ Indiscreet praise ...”

“... and most significantly, her late long work, Helen in Egypt (1961) – a psychomachia and revisionary epic taking up Stesichoros’ poem from the sixth century BCe, in which a blameless Helen goes not with Paris to Troy but to Egypt to wait out the war. Part of H.D.’s ...”

“... a heroic journey out of a return to a middle-aged wife. But women are not incidental to the Iliad. Helen’s abduction has caused the war, and the tussle over Chryseis and Briseis kickstarts the poem’s plot. It is Thetis, Achilles’ mother, who coaxes Zeus to punish the Greeks on her son’s behalf, driving the action of two-thirds of the poem. Aphrodite ...”