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“... did not do it in person; she just owned the team. Furthermore, the sources claim that her brother, King Agesilaus, urged her to enter in order to show that victory was a function of wealth, so her participation does not seem to have been her own idea. Again, Xenophon claims that Spartan women did not do their own weaving – a task paradigmatic of the female ...”

“... a reading of the play that makes sense of her appalling crime. The story of Medea, daughter of the King of Colchis, has a number of variants. In some versions, having fallen in love with Jason and used her magical powers to help him steal the Golden Fleece from her father, she murders her brother on the voyage from Colchis and scatters his dismembered corpse ...”

“... Geoffrey Lloyd has held the position of Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science in the University of Cambridge since 1985. The creation of this personal chair not only honoured a great and generous scholar, but also gave a much-needed boost to the growing interest in ancient science: a subject which, over the last two centuries, had been pushed to the margins of Classical scholarship while simultaneously being eclipsed by the rise of modern science ...”

“... will cure the problem of what modern society would recognise as the norm of menstruation. As Helen King remarks drily: ‘In Hippocratic terms, most Western women today are very sick indeed.’ The construction of the female body of medical science starts here, then, and it would be hard to overestimate the influence of this authoritative model as ...”

“... and shock, rather than elucidate, that accounts for its lasting presence. She is a daughter of a king of Colchis on the Black Sea, a princess from a country beyond the bounds of civilisation as the Greeks saw it. The golden fleece (of a magical sacrificed ram) is the sacred cult object of her country, guarded by terrible fire-breathing monsters (a colossal ...”

“... the place her pain is centred, the place where metaphors converge. She calls Jesus ‘the powerful King of Hearts’. Hélène Cixous has pointed out that the heart is the place where male and female metaphors become one. Both sexes agree it is there that love is bred and contained. The heart beats faster when you see your lover, or in the sexual act. It is ...”

“... Rape                           is the story of Helen,                           Persephone,                           Norma Jeane,                           Troy.                           War is the context ...”

“... then, that he cites in a footnote the ‘able revisionist analyses’ of the classicist Helen King, which irrefutably establish that this is not the case. Not only does the term ‘hysteria’ appear nowhere in Greek texts, but the various symptoms attributed to the migrations of the hustera – including respiratory discomfort, neck pain and ...”

“... but she didn’t like it much (no Coca-Cola). Together, they nurtured their beloved dachshunds, Helen and Gandhi; and they mourned together when Helen and Gandhi died. Yet for all the time they were united, Hearst remained officially married to his social-climbing wife, Millie, who bore him five sons. When Hearst ...”

“... Do real queens or goddesses get raped? Can beauty become vile? Such problems are raised by Helen of Troy, wife of King Menelaus, and by Sita, wife of Rama. Their stories (in multiple versions) are entertainingly retold and analysed by Wendy Doniger, a professor of the history of religions and of South-East Asian languages and civilisations ...”

“... technically these are crimes punishable by imprisonment, flogging or worse. When Abdul Aziz became king after conquering the Hejaz in 1926, he allowed Jeddah’s foreign community to import alcohol openly: he was forced to end this concession when the British consul, who used to serve drinks to his Saudi guests, was shot dead by a drunken young prince. Since ...”

“... as part of that biographical evidence: Constance’s grief over the death of her son Arthur in King John must reflect Shakespeare’s grief at the death of his own son, Hamnet; a reference to cuckoldry in Sonnet 93 indicates that Anne Hathaway was unfaithful; and so on. As Shapiro comments, perhaps Shakespeare was thinking of his own life at those ...”

“... So violent and motley was life that it bore the mixed smell of blood and of roses.’ Helen Castor quotes Johan Huizinga’s description of the waning of the Middle Ages at the very end of her book, with something approaching a denial of its relevance to her own account of the same period. ‘Blood and roses’ suggests violence and sex – or at least violence and sentimentality ...”

“... be a serf in the house of some landless man, with little enough for himself to live on, than king of all these dead men that have done with life.’ This is sometimes taken to mean that he regrets the choice he made; but more than that, he’s saying that once you’re dead, it doesn’t make any difference. Not that the living will ever really believe ...”

“... in this manner?’ ‘No word came from my mouth.’ She then tells him that the maimed Fisher King will remain unhealed as a result of his failure to speak. Perceval’s unfulfilled task, in fact, was not to find an answer, but to ask a question. So far as he is concerned, the answer is beside the point. Several thousand lines later, he is told, without ...”