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Oxford thought it was at war. And then it was. After the horrors of
the First World War, Oxford looked like an Arcadia - a dreamworld -
from which pain could be shut out. Soldiers arrived with pictures
of the university fully formed in their heads, and women finally
won the right to earn degrees. Freedom meant reading beneath the
spires and punting down the river with champagne picnics. But all
was not quite as it seemed. Boys fresh from school settled into
lecture rooms alongside men who had returned from the trenches with
the beginnings of shellshock. It was displacing to be surrounded by
aristocrats who liked nothing better than to burn furniture from
each other's rooms on the college quads for kicks. The women of
Oxford still faced a battle to emerge from their shadows. And among
the dons a major conflict was beginning to brew. Set in the world
that Evelyn Waugh immortalised in Brideshead Revisited, this is a
true and often funny story of the thriving of knowledge and spirit
of fun and foreboding that characterised Oxford between the two
world wars. One of the protagonists, in fact, was a friend of Waugh
and inspired a character in his novel. Another married into the
family who inhabited Castle Howard and befriended everyone from
George Bernard Shaw to Virginia Woolf. The third was an Irish
occultist and correspondent with the poets W. H. Auden, Louis
MacNeice and W. B. Yeats. This singular tale of Oxford colleagues
and rivals encapsulates the false sense of security that developed
across the country in the interwar years. With the rise of Hitler
and the Third Reich came the subversion of history for propaganda.
In academic Oxford, the fight was on not only to preserve the past
from the hands of the Nazis, but also to triumph, one don over
another, as they became embroiled in a war of their own.
A rigorously and imaginatively researched anthology of classical
literature, bringing together one hundred stories from the rich
diversity of the literary canon of ancient Greece and Rome.
Striking a balance between the 'classic classic' (such as Dryden's
translation of the Aeneid) and the less familiar or expected, Of
Gods and Men ranges from the epic poetry of Homer to the histories
of Arrian and Diodorus Siculus and the sprawling Theogony of
Hesiod; from the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides to the
biographies of Suetonius and Plutarch and the pen portraits of
Theophrastus; and from the comedies of Plautus to the fictions of
Petronius and Apuleius. Of Gods and Men is embellished by
translations from writers as diverse as Queen Elizabeth I
(Boethius), Percy Bysshe Shelley (Plato), Walter Pater (Apuleius's
Golden Ass), Lawrence of Arabia (Homer's Odyssey), Louis MacNeice
(Aeschylus's Agamemnon) and Ted Hughes (Ovid's Pygmalion), as well
as a number of accomplished translations by Daisy Dunn herself.
'Never less than compelling ... She consistently succeeds in
bringing what might otherwise seem dusty and remote to vivid life'
Tom Holland, Literary Review 'Starts with an erupting volcano - and
then gets more exciting ... Wonderfully rich, witty, insightful and
wide-ranging' Sarah Bakewell In a dazzling, lively new literary
biography, Daisy Dunn weaves together the lives of two Roman
greats: Pliny the Elder, author of Natural History, and his nephew
Pliny the Younger, who inherited his uncle's notebooks and
intellectual legacy. Breathing vivid life back into the Plinys,
Daisy Dunn charts the extraordinary lives of two outstanding minds
and their lasting legacy on the world. 'A fascinating, compelling
and excellent biography' Simon Sebag Montefiore 'Immensely
entertaining and readable ... Thoroughly recommended' Sunday Times
A biography of Gaius Valerius Catullus, Rome's first great poet, a
dandy who fell in love with another man's wife and made it known to
the world through his verse. This superb book gives a rare portrait
of life during one of the most critical moments in world history
through the eyes of one of Rome's greatest writers. Living through
the debauchery, decadence and spectacle of the crumbling Roman
Republic, Catullus remains famous for the sharp, immediate poetry
with which he skewered Rome's sparring titans - Pompey, Crassus and
his father's friend, Julius Caesar. But it was for his erotic,
scandalous but often tender love elegies that he became best known,
inspired above all by his own lasting affair with a married woman
whom he immortalised in his verse as 'Lesbia'. A monumental figure
for poets from Ovid and Virgil onwards, his journey across youth
and experience, from Verona to Rome, Bithynia to Lake Garda, is
traced in Daisy Dunn's brilliant portrait of life during one of the
most critical moments in world history.
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