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“... For David Robinson, writing in the Twenties and reprinted in the Sixties, the ‘perfection’ of Sappho’s verse was clear enough proof of her unblemished character. He was perhaps unusual in his unshakable confidence that (at least in the case of female writers) fine poetry could be found only in association with fine morals: but in other respects he was ...”

“... Some time around the ninth century, Sappho’s nine books were irrecoverably lost. We have some tantalising scraps, single lines and short quotations, but only one complete poem – the ‘Ode to Aphrodite’ (Fragment 1), which is quoted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. A few longish passages from other poems have been preserved in other authors: the most famous is Fragment 31 (‘He seems to me equal to gods’), quoted at length in On the Sublime ...”

“... Perhaps the most embarrassing consequence of reading Victorian Sappho – Yopie Prins’s impressive account of how Victorian poets over the course of a century imagined, exploited and distorted the mysterious figure of Sappho – is being forced to confront one’s own mental images of the long-dead Greek poet ...”

“... For​ various reasons, many of them neither literary nor trustworthy, Sappho has always exerted a magnetic yet frustrating attraction on later generations. The frustration is due in part to the fact that her poetry is predominantly private, only a small amount of it has survived, and very little has ever been known about her ...”

“... of Greek myth. Carson’s first book, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), was a playful study in prose of Sappho, Plato, the limitless nature of desire and the origin of the alphabet. The essay – capaciously understood – is a form still important to her, and most of her more recent books have included prose essays with topics or jumping-off points from the ...”

“... like my husband. What happened to women’s poetry in the last two thousand years? What about Sappho? What about Sharon Olds? The foil wrapper of the Durex Gossamer, weakened by hours of friction, gave way and my fingers found themselves rubbing together in a mess of spermicide and vaginal ...”

“... it plays itself again and again. Each of the book’s three monologists, Handel, Picasso and Sappho, do their bit of window-washing for the novel, in that odd mixture of aphorism and chant now familiar to Winterson’s readers. Handel reminds us that ‘language is artifice. Art is not supposed to be natural.’ ‘You see, I have to beware of ...”

“... after Sappho, Fragment 58You who, like undergraduates, are always younggo in for the lyredo not neglectto put your hands in the air say WAAAAAAand wave the long night endless –As for me the dawn breaksupon my tender body turningstiff, my hair from black to white –I find myself changedin this light, my hips locked,an untwerkable ass ...”

“... evidence exists other than the poems themselves. Unlike Richard Jenkyns in his recent essay on Sappho, Campbell interposes as little of himself as possible. Succinct comments on style and word choice (Campbell is especially acute about Homeric resonances) help to convey to the reader who knows no Greek nuances that cannot be reproduced even in the most ...”

“... bees, Fins and tails deep in porphyry sealochs – And the songbirds are flying in their sleep. Sappho That cloud-juiced apple at a high twig’s tip, Reddening on the utmost branch. The one the apple-pickers missed. Not missed. They could never reach it. Meleager Though the garland round Heliodora’s head Fades now, she sparkles, she is herself A garland ...”

“... I feel bad/about beauty?’ Finally, in ‘Some Say’, she gives a tour de force rendition of Sappho 16: Some say a host of horsemen, a horizon of ships under sail is most beautiful & some say a mountain embraced by the clouds & some say the badass booty-shakin’ shorties in the club are most beautiful and some say … … I say what they say is ...”

“... a canon of nine ‘lyric’ writers. This included poets who have become household names (Sappho and Pindar), as well as several who have not, such as Ibycus and Simonides – although the latter did come back to life in 1978 as the hero of Mary Renault’s The Praise Singer. Most poems by what the Romans were to call the ‘lyrici’ survive today in ...”

“... think. Besides which, it enables you to read, for example, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Sappho, Sophocles, Euclid, Hippocrates, Archimedes, Lucretius, Seneca, Livy, Tacitus, Virgil, Ovid, not to mention Descartes: for all sorts of reasons, I wouldn’t want to live in a world in which no one understood them. And I don’t suppose Charles Clarke ...”