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Features

Charlotte Higgins on why Greek myths have so much to say to us now

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7 travel writers you need to know

On Mazes and Labyrinths

Red Thread

A thrillingly original, labyrinthine journey through myth, art, literature, history, archaeology and memoir, by the Baillie Gifford-shortlisted author

Charlotte Higgins's Red Thread is a masterwork, an open-eyed analysis of the everyday mazery we face without even realising it, and an understanding of psychic and narrative architecture that's a pretty crucial piece of equipment for wherever and whenever we find ourselves lost. I read it on the balcony of a hotel in Rome... and it was as if the city itself opened playfully and thoughtfully around the reading experience in its amalgam of pasts and presents, histories and mysteries.

Any bookshelf would be graced by the presence of [Red Thread]… [it] ask[s] readers to surrender to the unpredictable pleasures of getting lost… playful and gorgeously written.

A serious, substantial, scholarly and yet also highly personal book about mazes… Red Thread is a book to admire as much as to enjoy.

[Charlotte Higgins] is no ordinary author. Her thrillingly original book – it really is like no other – is itself a sort of maze of facts and thoughts, ancient tales and modern phenomena… on every page there is a sparkling idea or a fascinating piece of information. It is also beautifully written… a beautifully produced volume, full of colour illustrations of sculptures and paintings and tantalising maps of mazes.

In this beautifully produced and richly illustrated book… Charlotte Higgins takes us on a fascinating meander through the art and literature of the last 2,500 years… After reading this book you will see labyrinths everywhere.

The joy of travelling with Higgins… [is that Red Thread] delights in the blinking movement from one subject to the next. In a few pages, we travel from Middlemarch to Ovid, from Arachne to Velázquez and his painting The Spinners and then back to George Eliot. It sounds dizzying; in truth it is illuminating.

This is a book to get gloriously lost in… It’s a lovely, wayward meander, combining memoir with surprising historical facts, unexpected connections and intriguing, imaginative speculations.

Higgins’ range is admirably, enviably broad… there is no shortage of visual pleasure in Red Thread.

Charlotte Higgins’ Red Thread is subtitled “On Mazes And Labyrinths” but is much more than that. It takes a nimble thinker to link the ancient stories of the Minotaur to archeological fabrication in the Edwardian era and to Arnold Bennett and the Potteries... [one] of the most interesting books this year.

Fascinating… enriching… very satisfying.

Red Thread is no ordinary piece of cultural criticism. It is certainly a learned journey through the role and history of mazes in art and reality. But it is also a deeply personal exploration of the role of the labyrinth in Higgins's own life… [Higgins] leads us all the way to the monster at the centre of the maze.

I adored this twisty-turny, illustrated history of labyrinths... A book to lose yourself in.

This erudite and elegantly written book transcends its esoteric subject matter: what begins as an art historical investigation develops into a thoughtful meditation on the nature of intellectual inquiry, and a celebration of human curiosity.

Fascinating… Higgins is a brilliant and scholarly writer.

A new book from journalist Charlotte Higgins is the [Radio 4] Book of the Week, treading a path through the winding topic of mazes and labyrinths.

The material is wonderfully rich, and the author I excellent at marshalling it into a series of vignettes to conjure the shape of a labyrinth.

Higgins’ darting, spooling path connects myth with faith, art with literature, landscape with architecture, anecdote with interpretation… its images and schematic diagrams of labyrinths adding a visual dimension to a book already rich in thought and observation.

Richly erudite and compellingly personal.

A rich cultural history of mazes and labyrinths… Beautifully designed and precisely structured, it’s also a personal book about childhood memories, dreams and feeling at times lost in life.

Charlotte Higgins's previous books include the acclaimed Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, which was shortlisted for awards including the Samuel Johnson (now Baillie Gifford) Prize for non-fiction, and Red Thread, which was a Radio 4 Book of the Week and won the Arnold Bennett Prize 2019. She is chief culture writer of the Guardian, a past winner of the Classical Association prize, and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. She lives in London.

'Charlotte Higgins's Red Thread is a masterwork' Ali Smith 
 
A thrillingly original, labyrinthine journey through myth, art, literature, history, archaeology and memoir. 
 
 The tale of how the hero Theseus killed the Minotaur, finding his way out of the labyrinth using Ariadne's ball of red thread, is one of the most intriguing, suggestive and persistent of all myths, and the labyrinth - the beautiful, confounding and terrifying building created for the half-man, half-bull monster - is one of the foundational symbols of human ingenuity and artistry. 
 
 Charlotte Higgins, author of the Baillie Gifford-shortlisted Under Another Sky, tracks the origins of the story of the labyrinth in the poems of Homer, Catullus, Virgil and Ovid, and with them builds an ingenious edifice of her own. Along the way, she traces the labyrinthine ideas of writers from Dante and Borges to George Eliot and Conan Doyle, and of artists from Titian and Velázquez to Picasso and Eva Hesse. 
 
 Her intricately constructed narrative asks what it is to be lost, what it is to find one's way, and what it is to travel the confusing and circuitous path of a lived life. Red Thread is, above all, a winding and unpredictable route through the byways of the author's imagination - one that leads the reader on a strange and intriguing journey, full of unexpected connections and surprising pleasures.

Journeys in Roman Britain

Under Another Sky

A journey around the archeological and cultural remains of Roman Britain by the award-winning author of It’s All Greek to Me. 
 
Shortlisted for the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize, the Thwaites Wainwright Prize and the 2014 Dolman Travel Book Award

**NOW A HIT STAGE PRODUCTION** 
 
Take a journey around the archaeological and cultural remains of Roman Britain with the award-winning author of Greek Myths. 
 
 This is a book about the encounter with Roman Britain: about what the idea of 'Roman Britain' has meant to those who came after Britain's 400-year stint as province of Rome - from the medieval mythographer-historian Geoffrey of Monmouth to Edward Elgar and W.H. Auden. What does Roman Britain mean to us now? How were its physical remains rediscovered and made sense of? How has it been reimagined, in story and song and verse? 
 
 Charlotte Higgins has traced these tales by setting out to discover the remains of Roman Britain for herself, sometimes on foot, sometimes in a splendid, though not particularly reliable, VW camper van. Via accounts of some of Britain's most intriguing, and often unjustly overlooked ancient monuments, Under Another Sky invites us to see the British landscape, and British history, in an entirely fresh way: as indelibly marked by how the Romans first imagined, and wrote, these strange and exotic islands, perched on the edge of the known world, into existence. 
 
'Mesmerising... Sophisticated and passionate' Guardian 
 
'[A] lyrical, haunting look at Roman Britain and its echo in our culture' Sunday Times

Wonderfully written and full of unexpected facts. Higgins brings Roman Britain into the present.

Beautifully crafted… The beauty of this book is not just in the elegant prose and the precision with which she skewers her myths. It is in the sympathy that she shows for the myth-makers, the men and woman who so very much wanted their very own Roman Britain.

Mesmerising… Sophisticated and passionate. She personalizes the story in a diaristic, almost poetic tone…her prose reminds me at times of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn…similarly haunted by a sense of a past slipping away.

Smart and up-to-date, sensitive but hard-headed, impeccably researched but gloriously poetic. The layering of themes, moods and topics is staggering. There's nothing like quite it.

Tom Holland, author of 'Rubicon' and 'Persian Fire'

Under Another Sky should be on every shelf in the UK. Part travelogue, part handbook and part revisionist history, it is a personal and vivid encounter with landscapes, artefacts and people… Beautifully considered and written.

A delightful, effortlessly engaging handbook to the half-lost, half-glimpsed world of Roman Britain... Under Another Sky is an utterly original history, lyrically alive to the haunting presence of the past and our strange and familiar ancestors.

In her gentle, fine prose, [Higgins] suggests convincingly that Britain was thoroughly changed by its two Roman invasions, and that modern Britain is still built on a Roman skeleton.

Charming, intriguing and not-infrequently elegiac... What is most impressive here, rather than either the erudition of the endeavour, is simply the writing.

Charlotte Higgins looks at what Roman Britain meant to those who, from medieval mythographer Geoffrey of Monmouth to W.H. Auden, subsequently thought about it.

Lyrical, haunting look at Roman Britain and its echo in our culture.

Delightful... There is much here to inform and amuse.

Part travelogue, part history, part archaeology, this multi-faceted book seeks out what is familiar – and what is not… This is an enriching and eclectic book.

A thoughtful and entertaining reminder that, long before the Anglo-Saxons, the Romans gave an identity to "a land as ferocious as its people".

It’s a compelling travelogue and Higgins’s passion for discovery shines out.

[She] is witty, rangy, unapologetically goofy and erudite at once.

This book will be of interest to those who want to see and learn more about a significant period in British history.

Higgins wears her considerable erudition lightly and nimbly hops between her knowledge of the classics and the changing perception of the ancients by the British of the past few centuries.

A very personal encounter with Roman Britain… Invites us to see our landscape and history as the Romans first imagined and wrote about them – strange and exotic islands, perched on the edge of the known world.

[Higgins] is as sharp and sensitive an observer of the latest version of Britannia as she is of the earliest one… Each chapter is not just a regional itinerary but also a brilliantly constructed and often exhilaratingly poetic treatment of wider themes.

Records [Higgins’] own travels around the island in search of Roman traces. She includes plenty of anecdotes about the continuing fascination with the Roman past and its penetration of the present.

Higgins produced another remarkable British travelogue… that was at once thoughtful, learned, witty and superbly written.

Filled with passion and personal interest… Higgins walks us around the landscape of this country as it would have been 2,000 years ago, and in doing so she ably captures the spirit of Britain now, Britain then and Britain in between.

Whether at Hadrian’s Wall or in a car park in the City, she [Higgins] shows how Roman traces are woven through British life.

A fascinating look at how we have viewed Rome's presence in these islands and what a debt we still owe to Roman achievements.

Part history, part travelogue, [Higgins] also brings to life the eccentric archaeologists who have tried to recapture that lost civilisation.

Under Another Sky is not only a work of personal history, it is more personal than that... It is conversational, anecdotal, in a way that makes it easy for [Higgins] to slip in quite a lot of information

A delightful, effortlessly engaging handbook to the half-lost, half-glimpsed world of Roman Britain... The result is an utterly original history, lyrically alive to the haunting presence of the past and our strange and familiar ancestors

The beauty of this book is not just in the elegant prose and in the precision with which [Higgins] skewers her myths. It is in the sympathy she shows for the myth-makers.

Packed with fascinating and thought-provoking insights.

A delightfully heady and beautifully written potpourri of a book.

A fascinating look at the debt we owe to Roman achievements

Shortlisted for the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize, the Thwaites Wainwright Prize and the 2014 Dolman Travel Book Award 
 
 
This is a book about the encounter with Roman Britain: about what the idea of ‘Roman Britain’ has meant to those who came after Britain’s 400-year stint as province of Rome – from the medieval mythographer-historian Geoffrey of Monmouth to Edward Elgar and W.H. Auden. What does Roman Britain mean to us now? How were its physical remains rediscovered and made sense of? How has it been reimagined, in story and song and verse? 
 
Charlotte Higgins has traced these tales by setting out to discover the remains of Roman Britain for herself, sometimes on foot, sometimes in a splendid, though not particularly reliable, VW camper van. Via accounts of some of Britain's most intriguing, and often unjustly overlooked ancient monuments, Under Another Sky invites us to see the British landscape, and British history, in an entirely fresh way: as indelibly marked by how the Romans first imagined, and wrote, these strange and exotic islands, perched on the edge of the known world, into existence.

Charlotte Higgins

Chris Ofili

Higgins is a wonderful scholar, and a great story teller. I've been loving these retellings, cleverly centered around the theme of myths told in tapestry.

Madeline Miller, author of THE SONG OF ACHILLES and CIRCE

[Higgins] leads us through the labyrinth of interconnected stories in a startlingly fresh way. It throws radiant new light on their meanings... This excellent book should delight many generations of story lovers to come.

[An] erudite and exhilarating collection... luminous, astute retellings.

[A] scholarly, capacious reimagining... Higgins makes you feel for these tormented, accursed mortals afresh.

We are in the hands of a fine, fluent storyteller... Higgins, like the bards who first unspooled these tales, creates the illusion of spontaneity and handles suspense brilliantly... Chris Ofili's drawings complement the lyricism of the prose descriptions. Higgins depicts art mediating life - the reason, I think, that we read books... I loved this book.

The feminism is subtle but persistent... This isn't about imposing modern values on ancient texts... her compendium deftly tracks the format of Ovid's Metamorphoses, one tale blurring into the next. But even readers who think they know their classics will discover some surprises.

Exceptionally well researched... The prose is almost neoclassical, in being limpid and allusive, clear and nebulous at one and the same time.

Charlotte Higgins captures the raw, magical originality of the Greek myths in this beguiling book, charmingly illustrated by Chris Ofili... She knows her classics - and her myths - inside out.

A gritty and exhilarating new version of the ancient stories in which the female characters take centre stage.

Higgins invests the tales with surprising new meanings... The command of Higgins herself, as the master weaver of myths, emerges forcefully....Ancient myths here acquire compelling modern form.

A beautifully designed book, with Chris Ofili's accompanying drawings giving it an extra sparkle.

Greek Myths is a gripping collection of stories... The addition of illustrations, done by Chris Ofili, add to the elegance of the book... I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Greek mythology.

A new retelling of your favourite myths that puts female characters at the heart of the story

In this spellbinding new collection, Charlotte Higgins reinterprets some of Greek mythology's most enduring stories. 
 
 'A great storyteller' Madeline Miller, author of Circe 
 
 Here are the myths of Heracles and Theseus, the Trojan war, Thebes and Argos and Athens. They are stories of love and desire, adventure and magic, destructive gods, helpless humans, fantastical creatures and resourceful witches. 
 
 In this telling the female characters take centre stage as Athena, Helen, Circe, Penelope and others weave these stories into elaborate imagined tapestries. In Charlotte Higgins's thrilling new interpretation of these ancient stories, their tales combine to form a dazzling, sweeping epic of storytelling. 
 
 With a series of original drawings by Chris Ofili.

Charlotte Higgins

Praise for Greek Myths

Higgins is a wonderful scholar, and a great story teller. I've been loving these retellings, cleverly centered around the theme of myths told in tapestry.

[Higgins] leads us through the labyrinth of interconnected stories in a startlingly fresh way. It throws radiant new light on their meanings... This excellent book should delight many generations of story lovers ...

[An] erudite and exhilarating collection... luminous, astute retellings.

Higgins is a wonderful scholar, and a great story teller. I've been loving these retellings, cleverly centered around the theme of myths told in tapestry.

[Higgins] leads us through the labyrinth of interconnected stories in a startlingly fresh way. It throws radiant new light on their meanings... This excellent book should delight many generations of story lovers ...

[An] erudite and exhilarating collection... luminous, astute retellings.

Higgins is a wonderful scholar, and a great story teller. I've been loving these retellings, cleverly centered around the theme of myths told in tapestry.

[Higgins] leads us through the labyrinth of interconnected stories in a startlingly fresh way. It throws radiant new light on their meanings... This excellent book should delight many generations of story lovers ...

[An] erudite and exhilarating collection... luminous, astute retellings.

Books by Charlotte Higgins

Articles featuring Charlotte Higgins

Powerful stories that make great gifts

Charlotte Higgins on why Greek myths have so much to say to us now

7 travel writers you need to know

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