“... 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 ...”

“... is that poetry is the highest of the arts: Beethoven, Raphael, cannot reach The charm which Homer, Shakespeare, teach. The 19th century, Arnold concludes, does not afford time and space to be a poet. There will be no poets after Wordsworth, ‘the age can rear them no more.’ Hamilton stresses the dominance of Thomas Arnold, and points to the ...”

“... A triple cubit the beard of his cheek. When Polyphemus rails against Odysseus from the clifftop, Homer asks us to imagine him visible as well as audible from the sea as Odysseus and his men make their escape (Arnold Böcklin paints the raging, blinded Polyphemus hurling a massive piece of mountain at Odysseus’ boat). Giants in legends and folk tales are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The temptation is to reach for arresting similes – as, say, Christopher Logue does when redoing Homer in War Music. But anything fancy here looks undignified. The result is an awkward mix, photorealism and metaphor bumping up against each other: ‘the charred body of a dead man whose head has morphed into something gory, alien, as of eyes and skin melted ...”

“... meant good, and that outward physical disabilities reflected inward moral weaknesses. From Homer onwards, Thersites was used as an example of cowardice. The emperor Claudius, who is thought to have had mild cerebral palsy, was mocked as ‘slow’ because of his physical awkwardness and faltering speech. Galen wasn’t progressive in any modern ...”

“... Census workers couldn’t reach many snowed-in farms, and seasonal workers were in the cities. Homer Hoch, a Republican from Kansas, produced a table showing that the number of unnaturalised aliens in the cities had supposedly further skewed the results. As a result of this campaign, Congress failed to alter the allocation of House seats as it usually did ...”

“... in health’ is a pleasure to read amidst the grand pious tradition of conjugal grief from Homer onwards. And there is similar delight to be had in the marvellously ironic judgment on a bigamist from Mr Justice Maule (1788-1858). With a sense of humour and compassion that hardly seems the mark of the modern judiciary in this area, he sentenced the ...”

“... staggered bedtimes; the sardine bathtubs and lavatories-named-for the-seven-birthplaces-of Homer. My best memories are all to do with solitude and truancy (we had no studies, lived fifteen or twenty to a room; time by myself was and is my deepest longing). Unwittingly cutting Chapel the first few weeks, walking along the Itchen to St Cross (where Keats ...”

“... preparing the ground for another great journey, this time to the saltless land? ... Or is [Homer] describing, perhaps even unwittingly, that saltless state of being that makes people take to the sea or to another sure source of fear when they have no need to, when they have come to feel the savour gone from their daily life and a deathly blandness ...”

“... as the enlightened pastime that it is – were, with rare exceptions such as the lipogrammatised Homer, of modest, parlour-game size: a neat quatrain leaving out a particular vowel or consonant perhaps, or a page or two of similarly deprived prose. Perec, however, had gone into the bibliography of these things, and found examples where the lipogrammatist had ...”

“... it, but I am here I speaking only in literary terms, which may become clearer if I say that Homer is only partially historical and greatly mythical, or that Fuentes’s history of Spain is as interesting as the ‘real’ history sacralised at school, or Eco’s Pendulum as the ‘real’ history of theosophy. And this is because they are palimpsest ...”

“... and even sand to keep himself awake. Moving on to ropemaking as a way of earning a living, he read Homer and Pindar while his master was asleep, then took lodging in a brothel for six weeks’ intensive study of Euripides; returning to ropemaking for a new master, he unstitched a copy of Plautus and hid it among the piles of hemp so that he could study and ...”

“... broke every middle-class convention of the period and yet came through with the aura of holiness Homer attributes to the elderly Helen of Troy. To Shaw’s announcement that he had fallen in love with Beatrice Stella Patrick Campbell, Ellen Terry made the exactly right reply that could come only from a heroic, holy and exactly right personality: ‘I’m in ...”