At a recent literature festival, I spoke to Madeline Miller, the author of the book Song of Achilles that tells the love story of Patroclus and Achilles through the words of Patroclus. This is a gay love story, told unselfconsciously, with a Bollywood-style happy ending in the afterlife when the lovers are reunited after they are killed in the infamous Trojan war. But what caught my attention is the way Achilles dies: not with the arrow struck in the famous ‘Achilles heel’, a departure from popular versions of the story, but in keeping with the original Homeric myths.

The story goes that his mother, a sea goddess called Thetis, wanted to ensure that every part of his body was impervious to weapons. So, when he was an infant, she caught him by his heel and dipped him in the river Styx, the river that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead. But the area that she held, the heel itself, was not touched by those waters. And that remained vulnerable. That is where Achilles was struck by the arrow.