Published in 2022
15 hours and 39 minutes
Bettany Hughes is an English historian, author and broadcaster. Her speciality is classical history.
Bettany grew up in West London with her brother, the cricketer Simon Hughes. Her parents were in the theatre: she learnt early the importance and delight of sharing thoughts and ideas with a wider public. Bettany won a scholarship to read Ancient and Modern History at Oxford University and then continued her post-graduate research while travelling through the Balkans and Asia Minor. In recognition of her contribution to research, she has been awarded a Research Fellowship at King’s London.
Bettany lectures throughout the world. She has been invited to universities in the US, Australia, Germany, Turkey and Holland to speak on subjects as diverse as Helen of Troy and the origins of female ‘Sophia’ to concepts of Time in the Islamic world. She considers her work in the lecture hall and seminar room amongst the most important, and rewarding she does.
What is this book about?
Helen of Troy is one of the most evocative names in ancient history. For nearly three thousand years she has been both the embodiment of absolute female beauty and a reminder of the terrible power that it can wield. Held responsible for both the Trojan War and enduring the enmity between East and West, for millennia she has been viewed as an exquisite agent of extermination. But who was she really?
Focusing on the ‘real’ Helen, bestselling historian Bettany Hughes reconstructs the true life for this elusive Green Bronze age princess and places her alongside the heroes and heroines of myth and history. Vivid and compelling, this remarkable audiobook brilliantly unpacks the facts and myths surrounding one of the most enigmatic and notorious figures of all time.
