Homer and His Iliad

Robin Lane Fox has been teaching the epics for 50 years and studying them for many more. His lifelong fascination with the texts has bred a sort of feverish passion …. the book feels less like a wilful provocation than a throwing down of the gauntlet by a 76-year-old with nothing to lose. Lane Fox writes less with hope than bardic omniscience that his book will become a landmark in Homeric studies. – Daisy Dunn * Spectator *“Homer’s Iliad is the world’s greatest epic poem,” writes the peerless classicist Robin Lane Fox … Lane Fox has had a 60-year relationship with the poem … he teases out from infinite small details hidden in the Iliad’s 15,000 lines something of the antique mindset. – Michael Prodger * New Statesman *Robin Lane Fox – ancient historian, travelling enthusiast, gardening correspondent for the Financial Times and cavalry commander in Oliver Stone’s Alexander – is the latest to turn his hand to this form of philological necromancy. The Iliad is a poem he has known and loved since his schooldays at Eton, and it shows: there is barely a page without some personal insight or hypothesis, often accompanied by laudatory adjectives … He knows the poem in enviable detail and has a lover’s eye both for the poem’s sublime beauty and for anything out of place … his confidence and deep learning can be thrilling …. Homer and His Iliad is rich, imaginative, perceptive and gorgeously written. – Tim Whitmarsh * Literary Review *A comprehensive delight for amateurs and academics alike, as the author soars through the canon of Homeric scholarship with a magisterial deftness worthy of any Olympian. A captivating tribute to a lifelong love of the original epic. – Lisa Hilton * Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year *This book is the result of a lifetime spent teaching the Iliad … The approach is scholarly and based on a walker’s deep knowledge of Homer’s landscapes, but also entertainingly idiosyncratic, with much use of the personal voice … a fine personal account of the impact of the poem as a profound meditation on our human condition in what remains a dangerous world’ – Richard Janko * Bryn Mawr Classical Review *

Robin Lane Fox was born in 1946 and educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of New College and University Reader in ancient History. Since 1979 he has been weekly gardening correspondent of the Financial Times. Alexander the Great won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W.H. Heinemann Award on its first publication in 1973.