If you ever wanted a Homeric jump-start, this is your book

As a teenager, like many of his class and generation, Adam Nicolson encountered Homer in Greek lessons. The subject matter seemed remote and uninteresting — ‘like someone else’s lunchtime account of a dream from the night before’ — and the words dead on the page — ‘as if the poems were written in maths’. But when Nicolson took Robert Fagles’s translation of the Odyssey with him on a sailing trip up the west coast of Ireland ten years ago, something drastically different sparked.

He came to see Homer ‘as a guide to life, even as a kind of scripture’. The Mighty Dead is, if you like, the resultant work of evangelism: a thrillingly energised book that travels to the real-life locations of the action (the likely site of Hades does not disappoint); that marvels at the deadly leaflike beauty of bronze-age spearheads; that sketches the history of manuscript transmission; that delves into the language of the verse and shows how, at the molecular level, it transmits a whole worldview at once decipherable and dramatically strange.