Give me strength (Times, £). The start of the piece:
“Dame Emma Thompson is adapting a feminist retelling of Homer’s Iliad for the big screen.
The actress, known for her roles in Love Actually, Howards End, and more recently the romcom Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, revealed that she is trying to get her adaptation of Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls made into a film.
Barker’s 2018 novel reimagined the mythical events of the Iliad — which tells the story of the Trojan war — from the point of view of Briseis, a woman enslaved in a Greek camp.
“If you have survived that, you are heroic. And it requires a great deal of strength of character and mind and spirit. So we actually do have to address this.”
Thompson said the idea that a woman’s “honour has been sullied” by sexual assault frames the attack as something to be “ashamed of instead of something to fight, to overcome and to try to prevent”.
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