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Historian and linguist Andrew Dalby is challenging the accepted gender of one of the most influential writers of all time -- the poet who created the Greek epics The Iliad and The Odyssey in the seventh century BC. Dr Dalby said: "There is no direct evidence of the poet's identity and therefore no justification for the customary assumption that the two epics were composed by a man." Women have a long tradition worldwide as makers of oral literature, he said, citing Sappho, the best-known female poet of ancient Greece, and Enheduanna, the woman mentioned on a Sumerian tablet who thus...

The title of Chapter 9 is borrowed from Robert Graves. Graves (1895 -1985) was one of those people one could find only in Europe: an Anglo-Irish-German, he was an intellectual son and grandson of intellectuals, a poet, classicist and translator from Greek and Latin, Oxford University professor, novelist and author of 140 books, most remembered nowadays for his I, Claudius, made in 1976 into a hit BBC-Television series with Derek Jacobi in the title role. But Graves was more than that. He was a champion pugilist and a heroic soldier. He served during World War 1 as an officer in...