Links from the video, if you read these the video might not be necessary, but each is worth a standalone read.

• Hilary Mantel on the purpose of historical fiction(Previously)(P R E V I O U S L Y)

• "When we memorialise the dead, we are sometimes desperate for the truth, and sometimes for a comforting illusion. ...We remember as a society, with a political agenda – we reach into the past for foundation myths of our tribe, our nation, and found them on glory, or found them on grievance, but we seldom found them on cold facts.

Nations are built on wishful versions of their origins: stories in which our forefathers were giants, of one kind or another."

• "Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past."

• "The pursuit of the past makes you aware, whether you are novelist or historian, of the dangers of your own fallibility and inbuilt bias. The writer of history is a walking anachronism, a displaced person, using today’s techniques to try to know things about yesterday that yesterday didn’t know itself. He must try to work authentically, hearing the words of the past, but communicating in a language the present understands."

• Katerina Cosgrove, a Greek-Australian writer on her concerns over Greek myth retellings:

• "There are plenty of Celtic, Saxon, Germanic and Norse myths for Western writers to engage with. So why don’t they?...I can’t escape the obvious parallels between this deliberate strip-mining of Greek culture, Lord Elgin stealing the Parthenon Marbles and the failure of the Greek government to repatriate them from the British Museum."

• Jennifer Saint on the purpose of retelling Greek Myths

• "A couple of millennia later, we might have scientific explanations for much of the natural phenomena around us. We have detailed archives and records of events. But myths can still offer us an explanation of the things we struggle to understand, and give us a way to articulate our feelings and experiences. We can find the truth in the centre of the myth, if we dig deep enough."

• "When we reimagine an ancient story – or some parts of it, or some versions of it, or we meld together disparate elements of scattered stories – it serves a new purpose. It doesn’t just call back an ancient world; it reflects the world around us now."

• Madeline Miller on her inspiration for The Song of Achilles(Previously)

• "I was already working on my thesis, on a topic that had long frustrated me: the way that some scholarship dismissed the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, labelling them “good friends”. I’d read Plato’s Symposium, where Achilles and Patroclus are not just presented as lovers, but the ideal romantic relationship. I knew that interpreting their relationship as romantic was a very old idea, and I was angry at the way homophobia was erasing this reading."

• "I realised that the things I wanted to say about Achilles and Patroclus weren’t a master’s thesis after all. They were a novel."

I found it useful to use some of these ideas as framings for other current retellings/rewritings/erasures/censorship of histories.