Society

Bettany Hughes has spent a decade, she tells us, exploring the origins of the goddess Aphrodite, first for a BBC documentary aired in 2017 and now for this book. I think it’s fair to say that if you saw the documentary, the book won’t have much more to offer you. If not it’s an intriguing tale that tracks the gorgeous and omnipresent Venus of western civilisation back 6,000 years to a series of strange little knobbly figures with penis-heads and emphasised vulvas found on Cyprus, presumably connected with a fertility cult. In the fourth millennium BC, a fearsome trio of goddesses swept into Bronze Age Cyprus from Mesopotamia. Innanna, described

A family memoir is a dangerous thing to write: one has to balance between keeping one’s subjects happy and the reader engaged. The Bosnian–American author Aleksandar Hemon, now in his mid-fifties,  takes the risk the better to recollect his past. While no two generations can completely avoid the proverbial gap, he ‘never (until fairly recently) felt guilty about that discontinuity’. The first half of his new book, My Parents, comes across as an attempt to address this guilt. The family chronology is traced from the early 20th century to the second world war, when Hemon’s parents were growing up, to their upward trajectories in postwar Yugoslavia, to 1993, when another

Of the clutch of female powerbrokers who emerged during the civil wars of the English 15th century, the diminutive figure of Margaret Beaufort stands out: first, for her spectacular navigation of the repeated regime changes of the Wars of the Roses; and second, for the act of political opportunism which saw her help her son Henry Tudor to the throne, in the process founding a new dynasty. She herself became the epitome of a dynastic matriarch, a pious, self-assertive figure of immense independent wealth and power. Margaret was born in 1443 into a great Lancastrian family. Like the ruling king Henry VI, the Beauforts could also trace their lineage back