Twice, I have heard Ukrainians perform Verdi’s Requiem. Once in Lviv, last Maundy Thursday, and once last month, under the great dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. In St Paul’s, performed by the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra with the Philharmonia Chorus, the great Dies irae – “day of anger” – unfurled in an operatic gale of fury, reverberating so powerfully around Wren’s lofty spaces that the music felt like thunder echoing between mountain peaks.

In Lviv, where it was performed by a Ukrainian chorus and orchestra, the evening began with a call to remember the war dead. Lviv’s lay a mile up the road: 153 graves when I first visited in autumn 2022, and by this year more than 1,000. Ranks and ranks of soldiers killed in their 20s, 30s and 40s, each grave planted with flowers and plants, flags flying above. On that occasion, Dies irae – in the more sober acoustic of the Lviv Philharmonic Hall – seemed to contain the furious ache of grief. Certainly I have never heard a more wrathful day of anger.

I have thought a lot about Ukrainian rage. This was a rage against Russia and Russians, and it burned with a fury that was at times hard to step close to. Ukrainians, too, have sometimes been taken aback by the depth of their anger. Oleksandr Mykhed, an author now in the armed forces, has written a wartime alphabet book for children in which L stands for lyut, rage. He defines it as a “special mixture of feelings when the desire to defend what is yours, hatred for the enemy and enduring love for your own people are mixed in equal proportions”. This complicated, extreme cocktail of feelings is not a peacetime emotion, nor an easy one.

I found myself making sense of it through literature, specifically Homer’s epic poems. Epics need fuel to motor them on their poetic journey. They also need delay, so that they become long poems, not short ones. In the........

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