Madness in Greek and Other Tragedy investigates madness in tragedy from the Greeks to Shakespeare and the moderns, parsing different views of madness in different societies. She presented the tragic hero as embodiment of the human mind, 'which lives catastrophe, suffers damage and endures.' Her 2000 study I'm A Man: Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll argued that rock music began as a "wishing well of masculinity", which drew on mythic connections between male sexuality, aggression, anxiety, misogyny and violence which derived from Ancient Greece. Padel has stated that she intended this to focus on women's voices but then felt she ought first to pick apart the maleness of rock music. The book had a mixed reception from male reviewers. Women reviewers described it as original, beautifully expressed, vivid, amusing and convincing; Rock writers Charles Shaar Murray and Casper Llewellyn Smith described it as "provocative and fascinating" and her analysis of rock's misogyny "dazzling". Nature, Environment, Wildlife, Conservation Padel is known for her poetry and prose on conservation, especially of tigers. While serving as Trustee for the Zoological Society of London, she inaugurated an influential programme of ZSL Writers' Talks on Endangered Species to highlight the Zoological Society of London's conservation work. and is an Ambassador for New Networks for Nature, an alliance of practitioners in different fields, artistic and scientific, who celebrate Britain's nature and wildlife. Her account of wild tiger conservation, drawing on her scientific background and Darwinian descent, was valued internationally for quality of nature writing, insights on conservation, travel writing on little-known parts of the world such as Sumatra, Bhutan and Ussuriland, her ear for dialogue. and portrait of both the tiger and the field-zoologist. More recently, she has recorded '24 Splashes of Denial' - poems on water and climate denial - for Writers Rebel, and 'Hormones, Divinity and Forest', her 2021 Memorial Lecture for Jane Harrison for Newnham College, Cambridge, united her early classical scholarship with contemporary environmental anxiety about the crisis in nature. Criticism, Teaching From 1998 to 2001 she pioneered The Sunday Poem, a weekly column in London's Independent on Sunday in readings of contemporary poems she collected in her popular books 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey. As Chair of the UK Poetry Society 2004-2007, she presided over the establishment of poetry 'Stanzas' across the UK. In 2010 she chaired Judges for the Forward Poetry