Society

For me, it was the sideboard that did it. Originally the centrepiece of my grandmother’s dining room, upon her death it was passed on to my mother, who kept it grudgingly in her cottage even though you couldn’t get to the kitchen without banging your hip against its bow front. At some stage it was passed on to my sister, who paid a considerable sum to store it because she had no room for it in her terraced house. Some years later, I was informed that I must house this precious mahogany albatross myself. After some handwringing and sadness, lack of space forced me to pass it on to someone

I have always cycled everywhere in London, not because I want to save the planet but because I want to get to my destination on time. I ride a big heavy Dutch woman’s bike: practical, less nickable and I can wear pretty much anything while riding it. On this occasion I was wearing frilly pink nursery-print dungarees, pink patent bootees, a sweet little jacket with puffy pale-blue bows down the front, a pink cloche hat and a pink-and-blue shiny PVC backpack. I was just locking my bike to the railings on Charing Cross Road when an angry man approached. ‘Are you a paedophile?’ he roared. ‘Why are you dressed like

The American critic and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn has just published a new translation of The Odyssey. In his superb introduction, Mendelsohn also does something that many modern translators and critics avoid, which is to point to the oddness and different-ness of Homer’s world. For that and many other reasons, reading Mendelsohn’s fresh and clear translation was a counterweight to one of the great imperatives of our time: ‘Let us look at this long-ago thing only in order to see if it can shed any light on the glorious us and now.’ Everything is about ‘understanding’, ‘listening’, ‘speaking for’ and ‘alleviating’ the suffering of others Yet a timeless work remains timeless