Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Heroes: A History of Hero Worship
    Unavailable
    Heroes: A History of Hero Worship
    Unavailable
    Heroes: A History of Hero Worship
    Ebook759 pages12 hours

    Heroes: A History of Hero Worship

    By Lucy Hughes-Hallett

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Beginning beneath the walls of Troy and culminating in 1930s Europe, a magisterial exploration of the nature of heroism in Western civilization.

    In this riveting and insightful cultural history, Lucy Hughes-Hallett brings to life eight exceptional men from history and myth to explore our timeless need for heroes. As she re-creates these extraordinary lives, Hughes-Hallett illuminates the attractions and dangers of hero worship. This is a fascinating book about dictatorship and democracy, seduction and mass hysteria, politics and culture, and the tensions between being good and being great.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateMar 24, 2010
    ISBN9780307485908
    Unavailable
    Heroes: A History of Hero Worship
    Author

    Lucy Hughes-Hallett

    Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Political Book Award for Political Biography of the Year, and the Costa Biography Award; Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions, which won the Fawcett Prize and the Emily Toth Award; and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen, Peculiar Ground, and Fabulous. She lives in London.

    Related to Heroes

    Related ebooks

    Social History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Biography & memoir

      Jun 29, 2022

      Biography & memoir
      13 min read

    • Article

      History

      Sep 21, 2022

      History
      14 min read

    • Article

      Spare Us The Wagging Finger

      Oct 26, 2023

      THE SOCIAL HISTORIAN Dominic Sandbrook could recently be found in the Culture section of the Sunday Times reviewing a book called Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain by Charlotte Lydia Riley. Sandbrook, who knows his onions, didn’t

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Woman Scorned?

      Feb 8, 2024

      A Woman Scorned?
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Man Who Sacked Rome

      Jun 9, 2020

      The Man Who Sacked Rome
      7 min read

    • Article

      History

      Jun 30, 2021

      A NEW HISTORY OF VIKINGS FROM SCANDINAVIA TO THE SILK ROADS CAT JARMAN Wm Collins, 336pp, £25 As a 17-year-old, Financial Times reviewer William Dalrymple was one of ten diggers who made an important archaeological discovery in a vicar’s garden near

      11 min read

    • Article

      History

      Apr 3, 2024

      Viking, 464pp, £20 In this follow-up to his 2021 bestseller Empireland, wrote Andrew Marr in the Times, Sanghera ‘tries to understand why the modern British display such amnesia about their forebears’ vast, world-changing project.’ Although the book

      11 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Matt Seidel

      Dec 9, 2017

      I tend to buy used books in bunches, which means the haul from some expeditions stays buried for weeks, months, years even. For this entry, I highlight three finds that, breaking custom, I bought and read almost immediately this year: Hugo Charteris’

      6 min read

    • Article

      Francis Spufford Vividly Recreates an 18th-Century New York in ‘Golden Hill’

      Jul 26, 2018

      Dear Reader, envision that Village which grew upon the southern strand of that isle of Manhattoes: a Lenape settlement purchased for 60 guilders and named for Amsterdam, later to be acquired by gunships of King James, and her wooden-legged governor r

      7 min read

    • Article

      Happy 200th birthday, Flashy!

      Sep 21, 2022

      The 200th anniversary of the birth of Sir Harry Flashman VC has been greeted with an outpouring of affection and admiration. You can imagine the old rogue laughing off the adulation, while inwardly relishing it all. And yes, I know, unlike those alle

      3 min read

    • Article

      From The Trojan War To Conflict In Ukraine

      Nov 30, 2023

      THE YEAR 2023 HAS BEENrich in works composed in tempore belli. The most impressive is Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine (William Collins, £26) by General David Petraeus and the historian Andrew Roberts. This is an ambitious and

      6 min read

    • Article

      5 Books Making News This Week: Labors, Lawyers, and Lost Ships

      Mar 28, 2017

      Isabel Allende wins the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for lifetime achievement, with honors also going to Peter Ho Davies’ The Fortunes (fiction), Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs (fiction), Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures (nonfiction

      7 min read

    • Article

      History

      Jun 29, 2022

      History
      11 min read

    • Article

      As Everybody Knows…

      Nov 4, 2021

      From Mozart’s Murder to Cleopatra’s Asp Graeme Donald Michael O’Mara 2021 Pb, 256pp, £7.99, ISBN 9781789293623 Ten Great Lies and How They Shaped the World Otto English Wellbeck 2021 Hb, 320pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781787396395 You wait all day for a scepti

      4 min read

    • Article

      We Can’t Ignore H.P. Lovecraft’s White Supremacy

      Sep 26, 2017

      Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the mastermind of cosmic horror, brought madness and existential dread to new heights. He ruptured the imagination in tandem with history itself becoming unimaginable in the early 20th century. His mythologies seep into the

      9 min read

    • Article

      An Adventurer’s Idol

      Oct 24, 2023

      An Adventurer’s Idol
      6 min read

    • Article

      Hilary Mantel Was A Glorious Original – We Have Lost One Of Our Greatest Writers

      Sep 30, 2022

      The death of Dame Hilary Mantel brings an end to one of the most remarkable literary careers of the past half century. Her great historical trilogy, Wolf Hall, earned her two Booker prizes, dominating the cultural landscape of the early 21st century

      2 min read

    • Article

      'A Column of Fire' Is Half Historic Epic, Half Thriller – All of It Engaging

      Sep 12, 2017

      Ken Follett returns with the final (we think) Kingsbridge story, now skipping ahead a couple of centuries to the Elizabethan era.

      3 min read

    • Article

      An Archaeological Inquest

      Sep 1, 2022

      An Archaeological Inquest
      7 min read

    • Article

      Also On The Bookshelf

      Mar 19, 2020

      As the daughter of Henry I, Matilda had a strong claim to the English throne. But the nation was thrown into chaos when she became embroiled in a long and bitter fight for the crown with her cousin, Stephen. This fast-moving biography of one of the m

      2 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Apr 23, 2020

      Reviews
      5 min read

    • Article

      Ovid’s Exilic Imagination

      May 25, 2022

      I suggest that Ovid was not simply exiled, but that he also exiled himself. The post Ovid’s Exilic Imagination appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Ed Simon

      Dec 5, 2021

      Each of these books taxonomizes the passing of anything that even remotely looked like it could be described naively as the "American Dream." The post A Year in Reading: Ed Simon appeared first on The Millions.

      19 min read

    Reviews for Heroes

    3.5/5

    18 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      I didn't actually read the whole thing, just the chapter on Cato...but that's really all I checked it out for, anyway, and it served that purpose adequately.
    • 4/5
      Bought for its comprehensive coverage of ancient heroes, both literary & real.
    • 3/5
      This is not so much a book about heroes, but a book about anti-heroes. Deeply flawed and in many ways extraordinarily selfish, the "Heroes" of the title are not your usual list. For example, the book includes El Cid, who essentially turned mercenary. The book is well written, but by the fourth chapter it begins to feel very tedious, since Hallett insists on trying to tie all the heroes together. Eventually the book starts sounding like "X--- was a lot like Y---, but different than Z--- in that he was more selfish, and he lacked the political acumen of T---..." After a few chapters of that, I had to put the book down. Still, it might be worth a read if one read only a chapter every couple of months; then the constant recapping might be a useful tool, rather than an annoyance.