"It is the rare history book that deserves the overused modern cliché that it reads like a novel."

Harry Sidebottom on my THE TROJAN WAR: A NEW HISTORY on what to read after watching "The Odyssey." The longer quotation reads:

Since excavations in the 1980s at Troy of level VI (as archaeologists call the best candidate for the period of the Trojan war) scholars have shifted towards the plausibility of Homer’s stories. A bracing example is The Trojan War: A New History by Barry Strauss. Trying to match the archaeology to Homer, Strauss sometimes uses the present tense and includes lyrical descriptions of landscape. It is a rare history book that deserves the overused modern cliché that it reads like a novel.

In "You've Watched The Odyssey, now Here's What to Read," The Times (London), August 5, 2026 (paywalled)