Bettany Hughes
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For close to three thousand years, Helen of Troy has been both the embodiment of absolute female beauty and a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield. Because of her double marriage to the Greek king Menelaus and the Trojan prince Paris, Helen was held responsible for an enduring enmity between East and West. But who was she? Helen exists in many guises: a matriarch from the Age of Heroes; the focus of a cult that conflated Helen the...
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"In his unwavering commitment to truth and in the example of his own life, Socrates set the standard for all subsequent Western philosophy. And yet, for twenty-five centuries, he has remained an enigma: a man who left no written legacy and about whom everything we know is hearsay, gleaned from the writings of Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes. Now the author, a historian gives us a vivid portrait of Socrates and of his homeland, Athens in its Golden...
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Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul-- one city, where stories and histories collide. The gateway between East and West, North and South, it has been the capital city of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. Hughes takes us on an historical journey from the Neolithic to the present, exploring the ways that Istanbul's influence has spun out to shape the wider world. This is the story not just of emperors, viziers, caliphs, and sultans, but of the...
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Award winning historian, author and broadcaster Bettany Hughes explores the complex attitudes towards women and religion, from 10,000 BC to the present day. If there was a golden age for women in religion, it certainly isn't the 21st century. The status of women in religion is currently a contentious subject, from the furore in the Anglican Church over women bishops to heated debates about the role of women in Islam. But it wasn't always this way...