“... of copper pipe and a chocolate biscuit and a porn magazine called Fiesta and a dead bee and a Homer Simpson pattern tie and a wooden spoon, but not my book.’ But the main thing Christopher’s father deals with is Christopher, and Christopher is the main thing his mother struggled to deal with. This is the parents’ story – it’s always the ...”

“... dislodge her mysterious impediment. ‘She is almost entirely uninterested in the literature of Homer, Plato and Herodotus, or the literature of the later period, written in demotic Greek, which her fellow students wish to read in the original.’ Her teacher, conversely, is very interested in philosophy and its cold comfort; he repeats a talismanic quote ...”

“... sort of mistake many poets have made, most famously Keats in ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, where he gave Cortez, not Balboa, credit for discovering the Pacific. Nothing in Hecht’s poems reveals so well what, however artfully concealed, lay beneath the surface of his work: guilt, self-loathing, pettiness.Though Hecht’s poems often ...”

“... in fact been. If you took Pope seriously as to the degree of fidelity required of a translator of Homer (‘to copy him in all the variations of his style and the different modulations of his numbers ... not to neglect even the little figures and turns on the words, nor sometimes the very cast of his periods’), his own Iliad would give you rather a ...”

“... head as well, and here Motion depends on Marjorie Levinson. ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ elicits various statements from Motion: let me isolate them and respond to them one by one. First, the sonnet is ‘a poem about exclusion as well as inclusion’: ‘Its title suggests that Keats felt he had come late to high culture (it is “On First ...”

“... Melville, James and Twain, among others, with significant asides on Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer. It aims to look freshly at these artists and to ask again why their originality matters. Names like Stevens, Eliot and Ashbery are frequently dropped and sometimes deployed, as well as Jasper Johns, for his painting of the United States that is and is not ...”

“... they govern is a great writer, and would have been a great writer without them, and so mocks, like Homer of the seven birthplaces, the confining clutch of circumstance, but I can’t. So, take them as they are. Yiyun Li was born in 1973 in Beijing. In 1996, she left for the US. She studied medicine at the University of Iowa, took her Master’s in ...”

“... teased by the Macedonian general Antigonus, who demanded what would have become of the Iliad if Homer had spent all his time boiling fish. The poet riposted that General Agamemnon would not have done so many great deeds if he had spent the day hanging about the camp kitchens watching poets cook conger eels. At least the ancient Greek military took fish ...”

“... of the Bible, very much as they can be against comparable nit – picking in the study of Homer. Yet, says Josipovici, it is time for literary critics to go a step further. In the end, the Bible is not literature after all, if by ‘literature’ we mean texts marked by closure and well – rounded form. Its untidiness and open-endedness are ...”

“... In the institutions of literary studies, it is often the authors about whom the least is known (Homer, Shakespeare) that are the most canonical. Was this what Mallarmé understood when he yearned for a text speaking on its own? Why is authority tied to the erasure of particularity? Why are some forms of particularity easier to erase than others? If these ...”

“... in the flesh. Pushkin, for instance, initially viewed the Greeks as the ‘legal heirs’ of Homer and Themistocles. But, following an unhappy encounter with the Greek merchants of Chishinau in Bessarabia, he wrote that it was ‘unforgivable childishness’ that enlightened Europe should be raving about ‘a nasty people made up of bandits and ...”

“... Classical and modern learning, literary debris (‘winedark’ and ‘slouching’ from Yeats, or Homer and Yeats if you’d rather), the Shakespearean puns on place-names, the opposition of French chic and US cool; the anxious, dreary and deluded male protagonists; the way the whole literal scene seems forever on the point of dissolving into wicked ...”

“... journeys, the folios of the Society of Dilettanti and Wood’s essay on the original genius of Homer. During the Seventies, Sir William Hamilton, who had personally taken part in the excavations, did much to make the new discoveries known. After England’s isolation from the Continent was ended by Napoleon’s defeat, interest in the buried cities ...”

“... in the earlier chapters is a dry telling of the story of his temporary devotion to the theories of Homer Lane and ‘Loony’ Layard: Refusal to make use of one’s creative powers could lead to cancer. Stubbornness found physical expression as stiffness of the joints, the deaf and the blind were attempting to shut out the physical world, and Stephen Spender ...”

“... literary) class came from country homes; towns were fought for; cities were bombed. From Homer to Owen the poetry of battle had obeyed the unity of place, been centred in a field of encounter. The language evolved by the Great War poets, with its dependence on the local and the particular, was not responsive to the concept of total war, the mobile ...”