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“... life, when I look there: and life is painful. I always think of this when I read the Odyssey – Homer makes the surviving Greeks, whenever they refer to Troy, just say of it ‘At Troy, where the Greeks suffered so.’ Yet all their life was in that ten years at Troy. ‘Lucca, where I suffered so.’2 Two years later, in the remarkable diary entries found ...”

“... Ossian’; Goethe’s Werther; and Thomas Jefferson, who said that Ossian was better than Homer. It was also Ossian by way of Matthew Arnold who structured the Celtic Twilight in-Ireland and Scotland. Despite all this Macphcrson’s texts have been ignored for much of this century, partly because his translatorese verse-prose is hard to read at long ...”

“... unable to crack the civilised code ... unable to unravel the dark secret of mutilation’. Homer, too, is implicated – even if not so deeply – in this veiling of primitive reality. An important part of that reality lay in the conflict between the violence of the male and the lamentation of the female for the effects of that violence, ‘the ...”

“... builders and explorers read? Those of an intellectual bent, such as Cromer and T.E. Lawrence, read Homer, Tacitus and Gibbon. The less intellectual read books about mountaineering, big-game hunting and pig-sticking. On the whole the young Thesiger belonged to the second category. He read the novels of John Buchan and Rider Haggard, Jim Corbett’s tales of ...”

“... the Nobel Prize for Literature; his name, apparently, came up every year from 1990 on. Yes, a homer, but it’s as though the world retained a soft spot for its Scandinavian corner, so grounded in the verities, so rudimentary, so shyly phlegmatic, and not least with such an appetite and curiosity for the rest of the world unfolding below: for Turkey and ...”

“... prose authors employing a plain, declarative style stand in much less need of updating than, say, Homer (whose epics seem to appear in new versions every month). Pothecary’s translation of Strabo is eminently readable, sometimes lively, and better in some places than Roller’s; but neither Pothecary nor Roller surpasses the clarity and naturalness attained ...”

“... in Hazlitt. Epea Pteroenta means ‘words with feathers’. It is an expression taken from Homer and usually translated ‘wingèd words’. Did Homer mean to compare words with birds or arrows? Arrows, I think; and ‘flighted’ would be a fair translation for pteroenta. Hermes, the messenger-god, was ...”

“... fame. Understandably, they generally keep clear of portraits such as the Naples bust of Homer, the Vatican statues of Sophocles and Demosthenes or the Augustus of Primaporta, but, maybe, in a next edition they might include some of the works for which high claims were made by Winckelmann, such as the Minerva Albani or the Barberini Muse, which has ...”

“... equates the tyrant or conqueror with the cannibal barbarian is found in a rudimentary form in Homer’s ‘people-devouring king’ (demoboros basileus), more fully in Plato, and later still in the dialogue between early Christians and their persecutors, where it partly revolved around the issue of Eucharistic practices. When Montaigne described the ...”

“... of the ‘quotations’ gathered in this ramshackle way would have made their ‘authors’ wince: Homer is said to have written ‘A good man is bettir thanne alle maner beestis, and in lyke wise an evel man is wors and more foule thanne any beest of the erthe,’ which is more like a misquotation of something Aristotle said in the Politics than a ...”

“... and H.D. spent some time in Italy that year, Aldington found on the Amalfi coast ‘Theocritus and Homer in form and colour’. He invoked one of the poets of the Greek Anthology, Meleager, and maintained that in order to love Italian beauty ‘one must have known the deep passionate love for Greece.’ Pound wrote that H.D. and Aldington were ‘wholly ...”

“... with purple would not be beautiful. ‘And so you would object,’ Sophocles replied, ‘to Homer’s “rosy-fingered Dawn” I suppose on the grounds that it describes the hands of a clothes-dyer.’ There was laughter all round. Sophocles returned to the boy and asked him to blow away a piece of debris floating in his cup, moving the cup closer to ...”

“... read as something like works of criticism. Many critics see ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ as the earliest evidence of Keats’s genius, and the sonnet treats with Renaissance magnificence that peculiarly modern subject, the poet as reader of poetry. Or again, the remarkable fragment which, only two and a half years after the sonnet, marked ...”

“... the National Gall’ry,/ You’re Garbo’s sal’ry,/ You’re cellophane’), here is Homer at war, here is George Herbert at prayer, here are the irrepressible inventorial masters like Rabelais and Dickens and Edward Lear, here, indeed, is a collection with so many fine exhibits that Mr Spufford might give some consideration, for future ...”

“... every echo is an ‘intertextuality’. And can one legitimise talk of Virgil ‘deconstructing’ Homer, just by slipping in an ‘as it were’? More importantly, the musculature of Melodious Guile seems a little distorted by the effort of showing that the propositions deconstruction subverts never were the point of poetry anyway. Perhaps in ...”