Daisy Dunn
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Articles by Daisy Dunn
'Sexo, estratégia e poder': como as mulheres moldam 'A Odisseia', o clássico de Homero dirigido por Christopher Nolan nos cinemas
Muito além de uma história de heroísmo, A Odisseia mostra como mulheres, deusas e feiticeiras moldam a jornada de Odisseu. Embora o protagonista seja um homem, A Odisseia é uma história em que as mulheres ocupam papel central A Odisseia, poema épico atribuído a Homero, conta a história do guerreiro grego Odisseu (Ulisses, na tradição romana), que tenta voltar ao reino de Ítaca depois de anos lutando na Guerra de Troia.
China wants robots to look after the elderly
The Race to Control the World; Sliced Bread: Dough – Eyewear BBC Radio 4 An AI data centre – imagine a factory of buzzing wires and computing equipment cooled by industrial fans – can consume as much power as a city. It has been estimated that, not too long from now, we’ll require 92 cities’ worth of extra power just to meet the demands of artificial intelligence. Ergo, the heat is on – but so, it is said, is a new cold war.
Królowa Tomyris kontra Cyrus Wielki. Bitwa, która przeszła do historii
W okrutnym akcie zemsty za śmierć syna wzięła bukłak i wypełniła go ludzką krwią, a następnie włożyła do środka odciętą głowę Cyrusa Zemsta Tomyris — wypełnienie bukłaka krwią i włożenie do niego głowy Cyrusa — stała się legendą starożytności Tekst stanowi fragment książki Daisy Dunn "Zagubiony wątek. Historia starożytności oraz kobiet, które ją tworzyły" wydanej przez Wydawnictwo Literackie w 2026 r.
Legenda głosi, że usuwały sobie prawą pierś. Prawda o Amazonkach [fragment książki]
Tekst stanowi fragment książki Daisy Dunn "Zagubiony wątek. Historia starożytności oraz kobiet, które ją tworzyły" wydanej przez Wydawnictwo Literackie w 2026 r. Grecy po raz pierwszy spotkali Scytów w VII wieku p.n.e. w regionie Morza Czarnego, gdy zakładali kolonie na północnym wybrzeżu. Zanim do tego doszło, wypowiadali się o kulturze scytyjskiej z mieszaniną podziwu i odrazy.
Tomyris i Cyrus Wielki. Krwawa zemsta królowej Massagetów
Tekst stanowi fragment książki Daisy Dunn „Zagubiony wątek. Historia starożytności oraz kobiet, które ją tworzyły” wydanej przez Wydawnictwo Literackie w 2026 roku. Już setki lat przed tym, jak upadła dynastia Pizystratydów, koczowniczy lud Massagetów przemierzał wschodnie wybrzeże Morza Kaspijskiego. Ci silni wojownicy w perukach zrobionych z końskiego włosia i z rozległymi tatuażami na ciałach zawsze czuli się pewnie w siodle.
„Zagubiony wątek. Historia starożytności oraz kobiet, które ją tworzyły” – fragment książki
Plus Minus Etruskie kobiety były niezwykle zmysłowe i bezwstydne. Jeden z greckich autorów napisał, że wspólnie wychowywały dzieci, ponieważ rzadko mogły z całą pewnością stwierdzić, kto jest ich ojcem. Aktualizacja: 30.01.2026 15:15 Publikacja: 30.01.2026 15:10 Kobiety w Eturii przykładały dużą wagę do wyglądu. Na zdjęciu sarkofag Seianti Hanunii Tlesnasy, etruskiej damy, znajdujący się w zbiorach Muzeum Brytyjskiego
Amazonki Scytów. Wojownicze kobiety ze stepów Eurazji
Tekst stanowi fragment książki Daisy Dunn „Zagubiony wątek. Historia starożytności oraz kobiet, które ją tworzyły” wydanej przez Wydawnictwo Literackie w 2026 roku. Grecy po raz pierwszy spotkali Scytów w VII wieku p.n.e. w regionie Morza Czarnego, gdy zakładali kolonie na północnym wybrzeżu. Zanim do tego doszło, wypowiadali się o kulturze scytyjskiej z mieszaniną podziwu i odrazy.
If reading books is over, let’s revive the epic oral poem
The quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles from Homer’s Iliad. The poem was composed and performed orally - Heritage Images/Hulton Fine Art Collection At some point in the past 20 years, we forgot what books were for. Look one way, and you’ll find them the subject of a fetish, whereby their colour-coded spines enliven grey rooms, their covers envelop handbags and their portraits are virtuously posted online before they’ve even been opened.
Zagubiony wątek. Historia starożytności oraz kobiet, które ją tworzyły
Najlepsza książka historyczna roku - BBC History Jedna z najlepszych książek roku 2024 - The New Yorker Jedna z 10 najlepszych książek historycznych 2024 roku- Smithsonian Jedna z 20 najlepszych książek 2024 roku - The Independent BRAKUJĄCA CZĘŚĆ OPOWIEŚCI O STAROŻYTNOŚCI W cieniu wielkich mężczyzn, takich jak Homer, Cezar, Antoniusz czy Kserkses, rozgrywały się historie rzadko zapisywane w kronikach.
The 20 books on the classical world you need to read
; ; ; ; Continue reading More for You Continue reading More for You
Was Queen Victoria's doctor the first psychoanalyst?
Queen Victoria’s Nightmares BBC Radio 4 When the Words Leave BBC Radio 3 Queen Victoria began to experience dark visions after giving birth to her second child. Concerned that she might have inherited the madness of her grandfather, George III, Prince Albert summoned her doctor. Robert Ferguson was not the obvious man for this scenario – he was an obstetrician – but the doughty queen had heard that he ‘paid much attention to mental disease’, and willingly consulted him.
Condoms in 18th-century painting
Waldy and Bendy’s Adventures in Art Apple, Spotify, and various platforms Artworks: Ways of Not Seeing BBC Radio 4 Waldemar Januszczak and Bendor Grosvenor’s art podcast has returned after nearly five years. It is, says Januszczak, ‘the podcast they could not stop – but they did have a jolly good try’. What happened? It isn’t clear; there are teases that it revealed too much, which is anyway a good ploy for attracting listeners.
The mystical hold of the 1990s over Gen Z
Talk ’90s to Me; Floating Space Apple, Spotify and various platforms At some point during the past decade and a half, it was decided that the 1990s were a golden age. While Britpop, New Labour and acid house do not immediately evoke the same spirit as, say, Versailles under Louis XIV or Augustan Rome, compared with what followed they were certainly characteristic of something.
The podcast of the summer
The Specialist; Your Places or Mine Apple, Spotify and other platforms The cover painting for The Specialist, a new podcast from Sotheby’s, looks like a scene from Mad Men. The people are so good-looking and so well dressed that you barely notice how odd they are. One chap’s walking along with a porcelain bowl as if it were a macchiato; a lady holds a plant in her palms in the manner of receiving communion; someone else walks the street with a gavel.
Two podcasts with the Midas touch
How did a myth about the consequences of poor judgment become a parable for aspiration? The question is posed by the Greek writer-actor Alex Andreou in his fabulously entertaining new podcast, Podyssey. His topic is the ancient myth of Midas, king of Phrygia, who was granted his wish to have everything he touched turn to gold. Midas’s new world was brilliant – for all of five minutes. What’s a man to do with piles of metal when every person he comes into contact with is reduced to the same?
The best radio at the moment is on the BBC World Service
Designing Conclave; How does heat affect our health?; Print and Shoot: The Rise of 3D-Printed Guns BBC World Service Online viewings of Conclave increased threefold following the death of Pope Francis last month. At least some of the traffic was rumoured to have come from the Vatican itself. This raises many questions, but the most pertinent for me this week is, what did the cardinals think of the carpets? Do they really have coffee machines in their rooms like Tremblay? Minibars like Bellini?
A fabulously entertaining new podcast about ancient Greece
Podyssey; Live from Mount Olympus Apple, Spotify and other platforms How did a myth about the consequences of poor judgment become a parable for aspiration? The question is posed by the Greek writer-actor Alex Andreou in his fabulously entertaining new podcast. His topic is the ancient myth of Midas, king of Phrygia, who was granted his wish to have everything he touched turn to gold.
Perfection: The Rest is Classified reviewed
The Rest is Classified; Voices of British Ballet Apple, Spotify and other platforms Interviewing for MI6 sounds to have been even scarier a century ago than it must be today. Candidates would enter an office to find a man with a ‘large intelligent head’ seated behind a desk and absorbed in paperwork. Everything would appear normal until he picked up a penknife and stabbed his own leg.
Booze now has its own Rest is History-style podcast
Intoxicating History Apple, Spotify and other platforms Moving Pictures BBC Radio 4 Intoxicating History is the perfect title for drinks expert Henry Jeffreys and food critic Tom Parker Bowles’s new podcast. Its theme is alcohol, but its contents are predominantly historical, which is good news if, like me, you are quick to apply the word ‘bore’ to any man who talks about wine for more than eight minutes.
Why space is the perfect subject for podcasts
Nasa’s Curious Universe; The Supermassive Podcast; Tales from the Green Benches Apple, Spotify and other platforms The podcasts I’m recommending to everyone at the moment are Nasa’s Curious Universe and the Royal Astronomical Society’s The Supermassive Podcast. Both have me convinced there’s no topic better suited to the oral medium than space. Not even history. Unless you happen to be an astronaut, you’ll find much of what is described so alien, that your imagination will go into overdrive.
They weren’t all scheming poisoners: the maligned women of imperial Rome
Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women William Collins, pp.272, 25 Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac must be one of the most eye-catching book titles of the year. I assumed it was just a riff on John Ford’s 17th-century tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, but apparently it came directly from the mouth of a modern tour guide in a museum in Rome.
This UFO testimony had me hooked
Illuminated: We Are Not Alone; Surrealism Remixed BBC Radio 4 In October 1964, a young man was driving to a dance in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, when his radio began to pick up a strange frequency. At first he thought it was just tuning in to a local channel, but then voices came through discussing some kind of nuclear war – and issuing bomb reports.
How Berlin nearly broke Bowie
Archive on 4: Bowie in Berlin; Off-Peak Performance BBC Radio 4 This week’s Archive on 4 is a treat for David Bowie fans. Francis Whately, the producer behind several of the BBC’s Bowie films, including The Last Five Years, has patched together old recordings and new interviews with Bowie’s lovers and friends to examine his life in West Berlin between 1976 and 1978.
A fiery examination of the damage wrought by internet culture
No Worries if Not! Apple, Spotify and other platforms The Curious History of Your Home BBC Sounds Historically, when a woman was giving birth, she was attended by the women she trusted most, including her child’s prospective godmother. The word ‘gossip’ derives from the Old English ‘god-sibb’, meaning godparent, but came to refer to what went on around the childbed. As Erica Jong later put it: ‘Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.
Library Journal
. Jul. 2024. 512p. ISBN 9780593299661. $35. HIST COPY ISBN Award-winning classicist Dunn ( The Shadow of Vesuvius) offers a history of antiquity with women rendered as full protagonists, providing examples both broad and specific. Her book shows that Minoan women were essential to the performance and perpetuation of ritual, as depicted in sculpture. Homer’s world, circa the 7th century BCE, was a mixed bag. Women experienced abandonment and sexual assault.
The First Lesbian: How Sappho’s Poetry Paved the Way for Modern Queer Literature
Lying in the eastern Aegean, about half a day’s journey from the west coast of Asia Minor, was the rugged Greek island of Lesbos. Known to the Mycenaeans, at least through trade (fragments of their exported pottery turned up habitually in the ground), it received its first great influx of settlers in the eleventh or tenth century B.C., when the Hellenes were displaced from their homes in northern and central Greece.
Do men and women need different podcasts?
Geoff Norcott’s Working Men’s Club; Time of the Week BBC Radio 4 Do men and women need different podcasts? The notion goes against the unisex, every-sex, what-is-sex-anyway culture we have come to inhabit. Yet this week we find, on the BBC no less, a podcast dedicated to men’s problems and one satirising women’s problems. Some would say the pushback has begun. Geoff Norcott’s Working Men’s Club is a recorded stand-up comedy act performed to a studio audience in Leeds.
Rushdie on how the best magical realism transcends fantasy
This Cultural Life: Salman Rushdie; Vessels of Memory: Glass Ships of Sunderland BBC Radio 4 Ask the man in the street to quote a line from one of Salman Rushdie’s novels, and he might struggle. Ask him whether he’s heard the phrase, ‘Naughty but nice’, specifically in the context of cream cakes, and you will probably make his day. It was Salman Rushdie who came up with that slogan in his early career as an adman.
'A woman should cast off her shame together with her clothes': What women in ancient times really thought about sex Original
Getty Images (Credit: Getty Images) A new book tells the history of the ancient world through women. Here author Daisy Dunn explores what they had to say about their own sexuality – flying in the face of misogynist male stereotypes. According to Semonides of Amorgos, a male poet working in Greece in the 7th Century BC, there are 10 main kinds of women.
The jaw-dropping story of the British Museum thefts
Shadow World: Thief at the British Museum; The Beauty of Everyday Things BBC Radio 4 It’s August 2023 when news breaks that artefacts have gone missing, presumed stolen, from the British Museum. I’m about an hour into investigating the story for a feature when a suspect is named in the press. I know him. He’s the curator I was seated next to at a British Museum dinner nine months earlier.
The Missing Thread: A New History of the Ancient World Through the Women Who Shaped It
From Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to Jane Austen’s Anne Elliot, women have known that men tell their own stories. As Anne (or Austen) puts it, ‘the pen has been in their hands’. But very often, men are also the ones who come to tell the stories that, strictly, belong to women. In The Missing Thread, Daisy Dunn tries to address this problem with respect to the women of classical antiquity. To be sure, she knows that a modern-day historian is still forced to rely on older, prejudicial narratives.
How to live off the land for a year
Terry Walton’s Plotcast BBC Sounds Could you live off the land for a year without buying a single thing to eat? This was the challenge a retired journalist set himself on Radio 4 this week. Max Cotton lives on a five-acre smallholding near Glastonbury in Somerset with his wife Maxine, two pigs, two dozen hens and a Jersey-Friesian cross named Brenda. Delivery of the weekly magazine Unlimited access to spectator.com.au and app Spectator podcasts and newsletters Full access to spectator.co.uk Or
Don't tell them but the French didn't in fact invent etiquette
The Forum: Etiquette BBC World Service Good Friday Meditation BBC Radio 4 When dining in France, it is considered rude to finish the bread before the main course has been served, and ruder still to slice the bread with a knife, lest the crumbs land in a lady’s décolletage. In China, you should never place your chopsticks upright in a bowl of rice, and in Bangladesh you may eat with your fingers, but should avoid getting sauce above the knuckles.
Man of letters: reading between the lines
Pleasingly, Stauffer is neither an apologist for Byron nor a constant chastiser This article is taken from the March 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. Lord Byron and his bride had barely left the church when their marriage began to disintegrate.
Why are there so few decent poetry podcasts?
Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcast Apple, Spotify and other podcasts Drama on 4: Sappho in Fragments BBC Radio 4 The late John Berryman described A.E. Housman as ‘a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but an absolutely marvellous minor poet… and a great scholar’. The Times obituarist went further, declaring Housman to have been, on occasion, ‘so unapproachable as to diffuse a frost’.
Ought we not have some shrine to the pips?
Do We Still Need the Pips? BBC Radio 4 When the Pips Stop BBC Radio 4 Extra Next week marks the centenary of the pips. On Monday at 9 p.m. a documentary will be broadcast on Radio 4 debating whether the six little tones which ring in each hour ought to be axed as obsolete or preserved for tradition’s sake. Some contributors will speak of them as annoyances – ‘the cockroaches of broadcasting’ is a memorable phrase – and others will ask what could possibly replace them.
Welcome to the Roman army, dear boy! What life as a legionary was really like
Channing Tatum leads troops into Roman Britain in The Eagle, 2011 - Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo Legion, an exhibition opening at the British Museum next month, will explore the life of the Roman army. Skeletal remains of suspected murder victims, a war trumpet, and a legionary shield – the first to be displayed in modern Britain – will throw light on the triumphs and tragedies of that elite ancient fighting force.
Welcome to the Roman army, dear boy! What life as a legionary was really like
Legion, an exhibition opening at the British Museum next month, will explore the life of the Roman army. Skeletal remains of suspected murder victims, a war trumpet, and a legionary shield – the first to be displayed in modern Britain – will throw light on the triumphs and tragedies of that elite ancient fighting force. But what advice would a second-century AD legionary have given to a new recruit? I imagine he’d have said something like this … You’ve joined the Roman army, I hear?
Welcome to the Roman army, dear boy! What life as a legionary was really like
Channing Tatum leads troops into Roman Britain in The Eagle, 2011 - Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo Legion, an exhibition opening at the British Museum next month, will explore the life of the Roman army. Skeletal remains of suspected murder victims, a war trumpet, and a legionary shield – the first to be displayed in modern Britain – will throw light on the triumphs and tragedies of that elite ancient fighting force.
Welcome to the Roman army, dear boy! What life as a legionary was really like
Legion, an exhibition opening at the British Museum next month, will explore the life of the Roman army. Skeletal remains of suspected murder victims, a war trumpet, and a legionary shield – the first to be displayed in modern Britain – will throw light on the triumphs and tragedies of that elite ancient fighting force. But what advice would a second-century AD legionary have given to a new recruit? I imagine he’d have said something like this … You’ve joined the Roman army, I hear?
Welcome to the Roman army, dear boy! What life as a legionary was really like
Channing Tatum leads troops into Roman Britain in The Eagle, 2011 - Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo Legion, an exhibition opening at the British Museum next month, will explore the life of the Roman army. Skeletal remains of suspected murder victims, a war trumpet, and a legionary shield – the first to be displayed in modern Britain – will throw light on the triumphs and tragedies of that elite ancient fighting force.
Want to learn the Classics? Read some kids' books
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Want to learn the Classics? Read some kids' books
Percy Jackson lives in a world of self-filling goblets, flying horses and twisting labyrinths. The 12-year-old protagonist of Rick Riordan’s bestselling children’s books describes himself as “a troubled kid”, but when it comes to distinguishing centaurs from minotaurs, interpreting classical Greek, and digesting the kind of food usually reserved for insatiable gods, he is little short of a prodigy.
The rise of vampirism in Silicon Valley
The Immortals; This Cultural Life BBC Radio 4 The Immortals, which begins on Radio 4 this week, is not for the faint-hearted. While it professes to be about the human quest for longevity and the elusive ‘cure’ for getting older, it focuses largely upon the transferral of blood plasma from healthy young people to reluctantly ageing people, or, as anyone with good sense might put it, the desperate descent from vanity to vampirism.
The illiterate poet who produced the world’s greatest epic
Odysseus is tossed on the sea when he notices a rock and clings to it. ‘As when an octopus is drawn out of its lair and bits of pebble get stuck in its suckers,’ says Homer, ‘so his skin was stripped from his brave hands by the rock.’ There is such elegant tricksiness in that simile. Homer still sits at the apex of western literature thanks to the beauty and influence of his verse. Robin Lane Fox has been teaching the epics for 50 years and studying them for many more.
Beautiful and illuminating: Radio 4’s the Venice Conundrum reviewed
The playwright Carlo Gozzi marvelled at ‘The spectacle of women turned into men, men turned into women, and both men and women turned into monkeys’ in 18th-century Venice, and Jan Morris, visiting in the 1950s, did likewise. It would be more than a decade before Morris went under the knife, but already he was contemplating a transition more permanent than any he observed at carnival time.
A comedy double act from John Cleese and Justin Welby: the Archbishop Interviews reviewed
I’m listening to John Cleese talking to Justin Welby in the new series of The Archbishop Interviews when the thought occurs to me that he might unwittingly be comparing himself to Christ. The comedian has just been discussing the failure of the literal-minded to comprehend sarcasm and irony, and the inanity of tabloid headlines, when he circles back to the topic of religion. Though not a believer himself, he is troubled by literal-mindedness in the reading of scripture.
Why the ‘Roman peace’ was really a feast of gore and excess
“To rule as Caesar,” writes historian and The Rest is History podcaster Tom Holland, “was to drive the chariot of the Sun.” Pull the reins too tight, and one risked plunging the Roman empire into chaos; not tight enough, and the entire system of governance could crash. By the mid-2nd-century AD, the point at which Holland’s latest book ends, Rome ruled from Scotland to Arabia, a stretch so large that even a divine chariot might have struggled to overfly it in one go.
Prayer for the Day is the best thing to wake up to
As the owner of a radio alarm clock, I could theoretically start listening to the Today programme before I’m even awake, but I rarely do. I tell myself it’s too much for first thing; that it’s bound to put me in a bad mood with some interview or other; that Today can wait until tomorrow – or at least until I’ve had my breakfast and a blitz of the somewhat jollier Times Radio. The levée, I say in a Bertie Woosterish sort of way, demands something light.
Crossing Continents is the best of the BBC
Ask a member of Generation Z where in the world they would most like to live, and chances are they will say South Korea. K-pop and kimchi have made it indisputably fashionable, and if the Instagram account of one of my Korean friends is anything to go by, life there is really quite idyllic, provided you can forget who your neighbours are. A recent episode of Crossing Continents on Radio 4 presented a very different side of the story.
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