Uncategorized

Over many years I have taught and immersed myself in Homer’s Odyssey, from leading studies for 10-year-olds to accompanying adults from all over the world through the poem both virtually and in person on the Greek island of Agistri. Each person creates their own poem from Homer’s words and images – I honour that – and those who take the epic from the page to stage or screen in turn influence the way many others understand the work. This is why the Salon community worked to present carefully selected passages in our recent Odyssey Live! event staged in collaboration with Theatro Technis in London.

I watched Christopher Nolan’s film at the London IMAX on the day it opened. The cinema was packed and tickets had been sold out for weeks. Everyone is talking about this film and I am LOVING the buzz around it!

Many people have asked me what I thought about the movie. As a film, I found it startling, to the point of being overwhelming. It saddens me a little that what film makers think we need is always something bigger, louder, brighter. It was certainly big, it was definitely loud and it was visually stunning! The experience and vision of the film really stayed with me, it was powerful. But, a few days on, some of the aspects that Nolan has chosen to shift, or mute, or totally disregard began to discomfit me.

In our present moment – with a sense of impending apocalypse from so many directions – we have such a strong need to be able to clearly figure the enemy. Perhaps this is what prompts Nolan’s interpretation of Homer’s epic to bleach so many of the characters of both their subtlety and their complexity. For me this is not just a male/female issue as some commentators have suggested, although Nolan’s treatment of the female characters gives us a useful example of this reduction.

Circe is my particular issue. I really celebrate the focus on craft and artistry in Samantha Morton’s portrayal of Circe, and I was hypnotised by her remodelling the faces of the warriors as though they were clay. This absolutely captures what later poets (Louise Gluck, for example) have suggested: Circe’s transformation of Odysseus’s men shows them for the swine they are – greedy, gluttonous and lacking in manners.

But what we lose in Nolan’s portrayal is the strenuous back and forth exchange of power between Odysseus and Circe. In Homer’s telling, Odysseus is able to resist Circe’s enchantments through Hermes’ gift of the Moly – she is aghast when she cannot turn him into a pig, he threatens her at sword point, she welcomes him as equal and then seduces him, he requests that his men are turned back into their human form, she aquiesces, and then they spend a delicious year of food, libation and love, with Odysseus’s men also fed and satiated.  Crucially, Circe is the source of the information Odysseus needs to continue his journey to Ithaca, and she gives this willingly as a good friend would.

In Nolan’s version, Circe loses all her fine surroundings and becomes a rough artisan whose skills are infused with a magical element. But at a cloying word from Odysseus, she collapses into a servile position and, after changing the men back, there is no further exchange between them. Her power is thwarted, her intelligence undervalued, and her role is reduced to no more than a brief moment in the adventures.

Nolan focuses on battles and violent encounters; these go on and on as though the camera is in thrall to the barbarism of what we do to each other.  Perhaps we find these epic film battles particularly satisfying at a time when it is harder and harder to figure out who the enemy is and the nature of the threat they represent. The enemies in my life today are greedy tech bros and appallingly stupid and avaricious politicians, not noble adversaries I can confront in combat.

While the challenge of the warrior-hero returning from war – not to mention adapting to being a king and a husband and a father – is certainly a theme of Homer’s  original; this is balanced with the meaning of HOME and the difficulty of returning to the place that is at the core of our being. Anyone who has left home – willingly or not – holds an idea of what they have lost that becomes calcified and coloured with imagination and the ache of nostalgia. For reasons both concrete and subtle, that idea of home becomes hard to match with reality given the passage of time and change. I had a startling experience recently in Estonia as I shared a table and started talking with a man and his son, to whom he was suggesting places to visit in Tallinn. He had left his homeland of Russia twenty years before, and his eyes grew teary: “I have lost my motherland.” I felt a clang of recognition: me too, my friend, although we come from such different worlds. Homer has Odysseus give voice to his recognition, in the kingdom of the Phaeacians, of a love of the true pleasures of home: a partner with whom you can celebrate the joys of shared friends and good food. The complexity of Homer’s vision is broad enough to show what connects different peoples as well as what divides. 

Narrative form is much better able to hold complexity than film, and Nolan’s enactment of The Odyssey demonstrates this. As others such as Emily Hauser and Catherine Shroad have already noted, the film’s portrayal flattens some of the complexity of character that makes the poem so absorbing, reminding us that any re-imagining of this foundational epic will inevitably reflect the values and preoccupations of the producer/writer/translator. 

In the original epic, Athena is Odysseus’s champion. She is willing to stand up to her father and remind him of the agony Odysseus has suffered, even though Zeus has just railed against mortals as being responsible for their own suffering – an observation amply demonstrated by Odysseus in his taunting and boasting to Polyphemus. However, in Nolan’s telling Athena drifts around Odysseus as a thin and insubstantial presence, tearing up and occasionally offering advice.

Penelope too is simplified: she expresses a hunger for power, for the throne, that is totally antithetical to Homer’s portrayal and to what a loyal wife of the time would do.

Even Odysseus is no longer a complicated man, rather he is a regretful warrior with a singular note of nobility. Personally, I find this less interesting than Homer’s wily and steadfast hero.

“Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how we wandered and was lost . . .
Tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.”

The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson (2018)

Nolan’s film has helped me to clarify to myself what I enjoy about Homer’s rich and multi-faceted text, and am thrilled that it has excited people around the world to want to learn more about the epic. I hope that this curiosity translates into exploring  Homer’s broader vision and a realisation that we are ALL complicated people. Above all, I am grateful to Christopher Nolan for making a film that has ignited new enthusiasm for a story that remains as relevant to the world today as it was nearly three thousand years ago.

On 17 July Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film of The Odyssey finally reaches cinema screens, and on 19 July The London Literary Salon is doing something a little different!

Where Nolan has Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson and Lupita Nyong’o, our own tribute to The Odyssey features Toby Brothers and Jane Wymark with special guests from the Salon community. No cast of thousands and no CGI, but together we will perform key passages from Homer’s epic in The Odyssey Live! spoken aloud, as Homer intended.

“We’re excited to see what Christopher Nolan has done with this 3,000-year-old tale, but we’re celebrating the origins of The Odyssey as part of an oral tradition, to be spoken live to an audience. That’s what we’re setting out to recreate!”

Toby Brothers

Most Salonistas already know that Homer’s epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, are at the core of our collective cultural heritage. These are the original models for how we make sense of our lives through narrative. Even if you have not read the works themselves, if you have seen Star Wars or read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, if you have watched Ridley Scott’s Gladiator or immersed yourself in the world of Harry Potter, you have glimpsed them in the background.

The story of how we define ourselves against our enemies (who turn out to be not so different from ourselves). The story of the struggle to return home (both literally and metaphorically). These are stories that don’t just shape other narratives, but also how we understand ourselves. Three thousand years after creating these works, Homer’s vision still inspires us and clarifies the essence of what it means to be human. 

The Odyssey Live! at Theatro Technis will hark back to these origins, offering the experience of seeing and hearing the words spoken aloud, just as the Greeks of Homer’s time would have done. Whether or not you already know the poetry, we aim to bring to life the beauty of the language and highlight themes that are as relevant today as they were in the 8th century BCE.

We will touch on the guest-host relationship, the struggle to reach home, the challenge of the soldier’s return, the difference between the inner and outer self, the shape of leadership, how we learn from encountering cultures different from our own, the press of the gods against human agency . . . all live issues in 2026!

Join us for our one and only performance of The Odyssey Live! at Camden’s Theatro Technis (Crowndale Road, London NW1 1TT). Tickets are available from the theatre box office with a Salon booking discount LLS15!

“The dangerous times and fatal genius of Shakespeare’s greatest rival” is the subtitle of Professor Stephen Greenblatt’s 2025 life of Christopher Marlowe, Dark Renaissance. In her review of Greenblatt’s book, Professor Emma Smith declares that “Marlowe’s life is chock-full of under-evidenced incidents that are charged with a thrilling imaginative energy. He emerges from fragmentary records already fully formed: a spy, a double agent, an atheist, a sodomite.” I am offering a single session ‘LitSalon Short’ to review the highlights of Marlowe’s brief, exhilarating and controversial life (1564-1593), before considering how art reflects life in the dramatist’s dramatic and poetical works.

On stage, Marlowe’s characters – Tamburlaine, Barabas, Faustus – demonstrate boundless self-confidence as they over-reach human, moral and physical boundaries, attempting to subordinate the natural order and the cosmos itself to their individual will. The language they use is filled with electrifying energy, breath-taking sonorities and dazzling verbal imagery.

Drawing on the depth of his rich classical education (the aesthetics and metamorphoses of Ovid, extended and elaborate similes à la Homer, the passion and brutality of Senecan tragedy, and the power of the persuasive oratory of Cicero and Demosthenes), Marlowe’s literary works also abound in the fruit of the humanist learning of his time, not least Ortelius’ influential atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), consulted to provide geographic precision and exotic, ravishing naming of places.

In the theatre, Marlowe pioneered what Ben Jonson called “Marlowe’s Mighty Line”: unrhymed iambic pentameter (blank verse). In launching an assault on his predecessors and their “jiggling veins of rhyming mother wits”, he provided the standard dramatic literary form that was to be adopted and developed by Shakespeare and other later playwrights.

In the LitSalon Short we will focus on the two parts of Marlowe’s first great masterpiece, Tamburlaine the Great, using these plays to illustrate his linguistic pyrotechnics and literary genius.

Tim will go on to lead a five-week study of Part 1 of Tamburlaine on Wednesdays 6.00-8.00pm (UK time) beginning on Wednesday 16 September.

Each Spring, as new leaves unfurl and blossom bursts, the Salon emerges from indoor hibernation to read Virginia Woolf in Alfriston, a village in the heart of the author’s beloved Sussex countryside. Close to both the country home Woolf shared with her husband Leonard until her tragic death, and Charleston, the rural base of the Bloomsbury group, where better to read this extraordinary author’s work?

In 2026 we mark the centenary of the period when Woolf began to immerse herself in life writing. Having tested her new narrative form in Jacob’s Room (1922) and moved on to the more successful Mrs Dalloway (1925), she began to consider how her work might overlap with the genre of the elegy, a phase of experimentation that culminated in the fictional representation of her parents in To the Lighthouse (1927), followed by the brisk and daring Orlando (1928), a work that deliberately ripped at the seams of the biographical form.

After exploring the limits of the gendered human life, Woolf progressed to Flush: A Biography (1933), a sensitive portrayal of canine existence that roots itself in the non-human world. This humorous and occasionally dark portrayal of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog inverts the hierarchy of importance in which famous poets are purportedly more important than their pets.

Woolf continued in this irreverent vein by completing her only play, Freshwater, in 1935, a work designed to be performed for and by her immediate family, which revels in satirising her maternal ancestors and their famous friends. Throughout the play, Woolf affectionately thumbs her nose at the previous generation while also exploring how attitudes towards creativity and artistic endeavour shift over time.

So, our band of bold literary adventurers arrived in Alfriston from points all over the UK and North America to gather at The Lodge in the Wingrove House Hotel. Here we could gaze out (and, between sessions, wander) on Alfriston Green and out into the South Downs. Over the course of four days, we delved deeply into these two works by Woolf – neither considered amongst her legacy texts – and found great riches there.

I always grow anxious before a travel study takes off. Will each participant find their footing in the text and within the group, will we discover new territory? By now I should know that anxiety is part of the journey, and then – together – we are able to soar.

This study included elements of drama and visual art, beautifully facilitated by our resident creative consultant Janet. To ask a group of adults to create masks, don beards, capes, scarves and porpoises, and then to perform what is already an absurd play, requires an unusually game spirit. Luckily, we had an unusually game group! Each of these creative events expands our understanding of the core texts, allowing us access from a new and different direction. The play Freshwater had not become vivid for me until I watched our group perform it, and it was so damn funny! The resistance performed by the actor Ellen Terry in seeking to escape her marriage and the rigid gender enclosures and conventions of her time – yearning to swim, donning trousers, taking a younger lover – was playfully but emphatically subversive.

We found some undercover actors in the group and, in our reflections after entering the play, we gained a greater understanding of Woolf’s complex relationship with the Victorian Age and her ancestors and inspirations. Sharon Bylenga’s presentation on the Pattle Sisters, inspired by the current exhibition at the Watts Gallery, expanded our knowledge of this epoch and its unexpected creative innovators – unexpected because history too easily simplifies and forgets the narrative of an age.

Our reflections on Freshwater also opened up our understanding of Flush through the theme of liberation. Flush and Ellen are both portrayed as captive figures: captured in relationships that are meant to be defined by love. Flush yielded much more on close examination, Woolf subtly integrates a critique of impoverishment in London in the mid-1800s through contrasting life experiences and the politics of space. We also get an intimate understanding of the world of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her invalid state overlapping with larger social enclosures against which she is determined to create art with an expansive perspective, and ultimately to claim agency in life and love. Using the imaginative lens of the sensibility of her dog Flush, we enter the realm of animal understanding, bringing up much for us to consider about sensory perception, a life outside of measured time, the flexibility of an androgynous identity, and the adjustment of desires in response to primary relationships.

What is ‘one Self’? When Flush sees his own image in the mirror, the question raised is how do we know what is real? Flush is portrayed pondering deep questions: is there such a thing as oneself, separate from what others see? He presses closer to Miss Barrett – ‘that was real’ – it makes him feel complete. There is a moment when you knit with another, there is a kind of fullness, when you give up the Self in love.

There was so much more that the discussions – both formal and more relaxed conversations around food and drink – uncovered.  Our time with Nash and Cate at the wonderful Much Ado Books in Alfriston was also inspiring and expanding. Nash gave us a glimpse of their vast collection of Book Art which, he explains, ‘is not just sculptures built from books, but pieces of art made with books, for books, inspired by books, art having to do with books.’ Being in the nurturing space of Much Ado Books – feeling a part of the vibrant community of lovers of words and books that Cate and Nash have created – and making our own art there was exquisite. Between the offerings of Nash and Janet’s guidance, each of us found our inner artist and a way to respond in tactile form to our immersion in Flush and Freshwater.

I am acutely aware that our present time is terrifying on a global scale. It seems to celebrate arrogance, ignorance, prejudice and greed. I know it is a privilege to be able to immerse oneself (yes, the self again!) in a beautiful place, in the company of hungry minds, to contemplate the work of a great artist. I also know that we need to feed hope within ourselves to remain actively engaged and resistant to tyranny. From these journeys we gain a greater understanding of both the possibilities and the failings of human endeavours, and we find models of resistance as we try to imagine ourselves into the better world we hope for.

All photographs courtesy of and copyright Janet Minichiello, 2026.

For this, our fourth year of offering Salon studies in Alfriston, Karina and I have chosen Between the Acts  as the basis of our second four-day long weekend spent in the East Sussex countryside – near Woolf’s beloved Monk’s House and Vanessa Bell’s Charleston – which offers the luxury of full immersion in a complex and lush book with a dynamic group of fellow explorers.

In this book, Virginia Woolf’s lyric prose and gorgeous vision combine to consider the sense of exhaustion that punctuated the Modernist period leading up to the Second World War. Edward Mendelson describes the book: “Everything comes to an end in Between the Acts, and then, as the book itself comes to an end, something unknowable begins.” The book includes a pageant composed of imaginary episodes from 1000 years of English history, and a close examination of the intricacies of village life in pre-war England. As always, it is Woolf’s penetrating consideration of intimate relationships and the places where language fails—but something else transcends—that lift this work from “the doom of sudden death hanging over us” as one of her characters describes.

Our sessions are conducted in the Lodge at the Wingrove House Hotel, a beautiful space in which to delve into the intricacies of language and ideas, with Alfriston Green in the background beckoning us outside. Might we create our own Pageant using Miss La Trobe’s script? We might! And we have on hand the brilliant Janet Minichiello as our creative project coordinator; Janet is working on a Book Art Project with local bookshop Much Ado Books that will give participants an opportunity to create a material response to the text.

In addition to exploring Woolf’s writing, there are opportunities for early morning dips in the sea at Eastbourne, walking to the beautiful Berwick Church (which features Vanessa’s murals), and a trip to either Monk’s House or Charleston. Wingrove House offers stylish and comfortable accommodation with a grand breakfast spread that prepares us for each day of discussions, reading, discoveries and adventures. There are a few places remaining for this study, do join us! 

N.B. Our first Alfriston study focuses on Flush, one of Woolf’s more playful creations that voices the relationship between a spaniel and his owner, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Combined with a reading of Woolf’s satirical play Freshwater, this four-day weekend (9-12 April) will also include a creative project and local adventures, as well as an invigorated discussion about the dynamic between animals and humans. We have a place reserved for the resident London Literary Salon spaniel (pictured above), who also plans to be present for the study.

Click on the links below for full information on the studies in Alfriston:

Flush & Freshwater (9-12 April)

Between the Acts (16-19 April)

As we climbed the grand staircase in the Opera Garnier, Melanie turned to me and said, “Can’t you just see the ball gowns and hear silk gliding over marble?” Yes — for a moment we were swept back to Proust’s Belle Epoque . . .

L’escalier de l’opera Garnier, painting by Louis Béroud, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; photograph by
Benh LIEU SONG, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; photograph of ceiling by Melanie Simons

“When good Americans die they go to Paris,” Oscar Wilde quipped. I guess I’ve been good, because I just enjoyed a week in Paris with a convivial group of salonistas: a week of absorbing beauty, of learning and discovery, of good company and delicious food. Whether it was standing in front of Baudelaire’s grave while Olivier recited “Correspondences”  or relaxing in the actual bed where Proust wrote À la recherche du temps perdu (Okay, I couldn’t get onto the bed, but I was less than five feet away), it felt like a journey back to another era.

Proust and 19th-Century French art — this study affirmed the London Literary Salon’s tradition of literary travel and took us in a new direction: museum visits and discussions of painting and sculpture. 

As we gathered around four versions of Monet’s Rouen Cathedral and reflected on the colours, sense of focus, and contrast between light and shade, we began to enter (just a little way) into the artistic process, and found parallels to Proust’s writing. 

Similarly, we looked at three paintings of ballet dancers by Degas — one early, one middle, and one late in his career — enabling us to follow his artistic path and see changes in his use of line, colour, and composition.

And finally, in the Rodin Museum we compared the powerful sculptures of Rodin and Claudel, each with a unique and expressive vision. 

The beautiful art we saw in Paris, the variety of styles and artistic visions we experienced in the Louvre and Musee d’Orsay are illuminated by Proust when he writes:

“for style for the writer no less than colour for the painter is a question not of technique but of vision . . . Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.” 

Ahead of the study I produced Padlet presentations of the art of Paris and the period to share with participants and, once we were there, I asked everyone to pick a favourite artwork we had seen. I then showed the paintings on a digital projector in our hotel as each person shared with the group what they found inspiring. It was a joy for me to see moments of discovery, to see people connect with art emotionally and intellectually. A wonderful aspect of the Salon community is how people bring their ideas and life experiences to the table to share with the group. As an example, David gave a presentation on Schopenhauer’s philosophy and how it connects with Proust’s writing that added extra depth to our discussions. 

In addition to the inspiring art, there was tasty food and good company: we had memorable meals and conversations, and the beginnings of new friendships. Gargouille and Brigitte restaurants were highlights for me. At Gargouille we had our own private room, where we were served multiple courses of small plates. I’d describe the food as modern Mediterranean, and I enjoyed the variety of spices and herbs. Toby reunited with a few of the original members of the Paris Salon, who shared with us their memories of literary discussions and told us what it was like to live in Paris full time. Brigitte is a traditional French bistro with a lovely old wooden bar and wood-panelled walls; the quality of food and service was high, and we enjoyed their catch of the day and more than a few glasses of wine. Our museum lunches were also memorable, from the cafe beneath the enormous clock in the Orsay, to Rodin’s garden, to the Louvre’s Café Mollien. Although, to be honest, after wandering endless corridors in the Louvre, any refreshment would have been welcome.  

We were mostly fortunate with weather and strolled through Paris’s green spaces enjoying their sculptures and flowers. We visited Parc Monceau, the Tuileries, and walked along the Seine to the restored Notre Dame Cathedral and Shakespeare and Co bookstore. I return to Wilde’s observation: Paris is a bit like heaven, at least for an American like me.

When W. G. Sebald died in 2001 his status as the pre-eminent European author of his generation was at its height. For Susan Sontag, he represented rare proof that ‘literary greatness is still possible’, and he was widely tipped for the Nobel Prize. Part of his appeal was that, appearing at the end of the 20th century, his prose fictions memorialised the victims of that century and helped us to understand the impact of its horrors and vicissitudes.

A quarter of a century on, why read – or re-read – Sebald today? There has been an increasing othering of people in the current political and social climate around refugees and asylum seekers. As Rowan Williams wrote in a recent Guardian piece, ‘To speak as though these people are anything other than ordinary is to reinforce the violence they have already experienced, the refusal to see them humanly.’  Sebald can help us find the antidote to this lack of understanding and humanity. In a different context, but one with universal applications, Sebald sought an empathic connection with the victims of 20th century history, the displaced and the deracinated. His unique literary project found new ways to establish a personal connection – through his listening narrator-figure, his ‘bricolage’-like combination of multiple sources, his haunting use of photographs, and his determination to let people speak for themselves. As a member of the generation of Germans who grew up in the shadow of World War II, Sebald’s key insight came when he came face to face with his first Jewish victim of the Holocaust in the 1960s, which he later expressed as Truth can only really be grasped through the encounter with real individual persons. Sebald found ways to stage this encounter in literature of profound beauty and insight.

Update July 2026: Join Lewis in our next reading of The Emigrants (1993) over eight weeks from 16 September- 4 November 2026.