Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
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Название: Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

Автор: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

Серия:

isbn: 9780007404674

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ 7130-559f-560d-bed7-8d778d832ced">

      HEROES

      Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

      LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT

       DEDICATION

      For Dan

      CONTENTS

       COVER

       TITLE PAGE

       IV EL CID

       V FRANCIS DRAKE

       VI WALLENSTEIN

       VII GARIBALDI

       VIII ODYSSEUS

       AUTHOR’S NOTE

       REFERENCES

       BIBLIOGRAPHY

       INDEX

       P.S. IDEAS, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES …

       ABOUT THE AUTHOR

       THE DELIGHT OF WRITING

       LIFE AT A GLANCE

       TEN FAVOURITE BOOKS

       A WRITING LIFE

       ABOUT THE BOOK

       THE FANTASY OF SUPERMAN

       READ ON

       IF YOU LOVED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE …

       HAVE YOU READ?

       FIND OUT MORE

       ABOUT THE AUTHOR

       PRAISE

       ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

       COPYRIGHT

       ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

       PROLOGUE

      ‘RAGE!’ THE FIRST WORD of the Iliad, the word that inaugurates Europe’s literary culture and introduces one of its dominant themes. The rage not of Agamemnon, king and commander, but of Achilles, the semi-divine delinquent, the paradigmatic hero whose terrible choice of glory at the price of an early death has haunted the collective imagination of the West for two and a half millennia.

      Heroes are dynamic, seductive people – they wouldn’t be heroes otherwise – and heroic rage is thrilling to contemplate. It is the expression of a superb spirit. It is associated with courage and integrity and a disdain for the cramping compromises by means of which the unheroic majority manage their lives – attributes that are widely considered noble. It is also, and therefore, profoundly disruptive of any civil state. Homer’s Achilles was the ‘the best of the Achaeans’, the pre-eminent Greek warrior, but his rage was directed, not against his people’s enemies, but against Agamemnon, his people’s leader. The Iliad is a celebration of Achilles’ lethal glamour: it is also the story of how he came close to occasioning the defeat of the community of which he was the most brilliant representative.

      This book is about Achilles and some of his real-life successors (whether Homer’s hero really lived we are unlikely ever to know for certain). It takes the form of a series of brief lives of people who have been considered by their contemporaries (and in most cases by posterity as well) to be exceptionally, even perhaps supernaturally, gifted and so to be capable of something momentous – the defeat of an enemy, the salvation of a race, the preservation of a political system, the completion of a voyage – which no one else could have accomplished. In 411 BC the people of Athens resolved to recall Alcibiades, whom they had once condemned to death and who had subsequently fought with devastating success for their opponents, because, as one of their commanders told the Assembly, he was ‘the only person living’ who could save their state. So the eleventh-century King Alfonso VI of Castile turned to Rodrigo Díaz, known as the Cid – a man he had twice banished – when African invaders poured into Spain, because whatever threat the Cid posed to the stability of the kingdom he was known to have been ‘born in a happy hour’ and could therefore never be defeated. And so in 1630 the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand, having first nerved himself to dismiss his overweening and intransigent General, Albrecht von Wallenstein, had then to humble himself by imploring Wallenstein to resume his command and save the empire from the onslaught of the invading Swedes, something СКАЧАТЬ