麻豆约拍

Charlotte Higgins explores our ancient fascination with mazes and labyrinths, and reflects on their significance - in art and in mythology, in literature and in life.

Her own interest was inspired by a childhood visit to the palace of Knossos on the island of Crete - where, according to legend, King Minos ordered the construction of a labyrinth to house the half-bull, half-man Minotaur. The monstrous creature was slain by the hero Theseus, who famously managed to escape from the labyrinth with the help of a ball of red thread supplied by Minos's daughter, Ariadne.

"This is where it began," writes Higgins, "my longing for the labyrinth..."

It was also the beginning of her career as a classicist: "I tried to learn my way back there," she says, going on to study Greek and Latin at school and then at Oxford.

As for her own sense of direction: "I have never been able to find my way. Turn me loose in a city without a map and panic rises, as if I were a child who had lost the grip of a parent's hand in a crowd."

And in life? "What frightens me more than the wrong turns I have taken ... are the right turns, the ones I so nearly didn't take...."

Charlotte Higgins is chief culture writer of the Guardian and the author of three previous books on the ancient world, including Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, short-listed for the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction. She is also the author of This New Noise: the Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the 麻豆约拍.

Written and read by Charlotte Higgins.

Produced and abridged in five parts by David Jackson Young.

First broadcast on 麻豆约拍 Radio 4 in July 2018.

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