ANTIQUITY MATTERS

Frederic Raphael is an Oscar and BAFTA winning screenwriter, biographer, novelist and journalist, but it is to his greatest love, the Classics, he returns here. The culmination of a writing life of over 60 years, during which he has returned time and again to the literature and landscape of the ancient world, he employs his renowned wit and erudition to describe the complexities and contradictions which underlie the creation of Western civilisation and how the ancients, their lives and their writings continue to influence contemporary society. He tackles a broad range of topics, from the presumed superiority of democracy to today's LGBT+ rights movement and presents an often daringly unconventional view of the Greek and Roman world which will provoke, surprise and undoubtedly entertain readers. His depth of knowledge across the aeons and mastery of the fascinating history that lives between myth and pre-history is astounding and he evokes the Greek and Roman heroes, villains and gods with such unabashed glee it is impossible not to be carried along with his brio. Endlessly informative and with always a wry aside, he shows how the Classical interplay of fiction and reality, rhetorical aspiration and practical cunning is still threaded through modern culture. 360pp. US edition.