Search results for ""Author Daisy Dunn""

‘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

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Odysseus' ten-year homecoming in 1,000 pieces: dive into Homer's timeless epic with this jigsaw puzzle and concertina fold-out. Homer's Odyssey, predating the invention of writing in ancient Greece, is revived in this 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. Encounter the one-eyed Cyclops, who feasts on the flesh of men; bewitching women, who charm with songs and spells; and meddling gods and goddesses, who shape the hero's fate. Follow Odysseus' journey using the accompanying concertina, exploring twenty key scenes. Daisy Dunn's text will ignite fresh interest in one of the world's oldest and greatest poems. Get ready for a modern take on this ancient masterpiece.

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''A brilliant concept, executed with enviable elegance'' Lucy Worsley''A gem of a book. Thanks to Daisy Dunn''s elegant and lively retelling of history, the women of the ancient world are restored to the centre of the story of classical antiquity. It was a joy to read.'' Peter FrankopanSpanning 3,000 years, from the birth of Minoan Crete to the death of the Julio-Claudian dynasty in Rome, a magisterial new history of the ancient world told, for the very first time, through women. For centuries, men have been writing histories of antiquity filled with warlords, emperors and kings. But when it comes to incorporating women aside from Cleopatra and Boudica, writers have been more comfortable describing mythical heroines than real ones. While Penelope and Helen of Troy live on in the imagination, their real-life counterparts have been relegated to the margins. In The Missing Thread, Daisy Dunn inverts this tradition and pu

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When Pliny the Elder perished at Stabiae during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, he left behind an enormous compendium of knowledge, his thirty-seven-volume Natural History, and a teenaged nephew who revered him as a father. Grieving his loss, Pliny the Younger inherited the Elder’s notebooks—filled with pearls of wisdom—and his legacy. At its heart, The Shadow of Vesuvius is a literary biography of the younger man, who would grow up to become a lawyer, senator, poet, collector of villas, and chronicler of the Roman Empire from the dire days of terror under Emperor Domitian to the gentler times of Emperor Trajan. A biography that will appeal to lovers of Mary Beard books, it is also a moving narrative about the profound influence of a father figure on his adopted son. Interweaving the younger Pliny’s Letters with extracts from the Elder’s Natural History, Daisy Dunn paints a vivid, compellingly readable portrait of two of antiquity’s greatest minds.

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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.

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