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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with a political agenda. Homer could assume that his audience knew the outline of the myth of Helen of Troy, and that in consequence he didn’t need to lay it all out. But perhaps there never was a consistent and complete version of any myth, one that you could walk all the way around and find that everything matched and agreed from every angle. In the ...”

“... arrow that pierces his heel. After the funeral, the fall of Troy – which Cook tells mostly from Helen’s point of view. When Yeats wrote, in ‘Leda and the Swan’, ‘A shudder in the loins engenders there/The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead,’ he was thinking as much of Clytemnestra as of ...”