“... 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 ...”

“... remedy.’ Little wonder his magnum opus was to be entitled ‘The Task’; no wonder translating Homer was so attractive. Pursuing ‘the jingling art’ for ‘amusement’, and in order to keep madness and self-destruction at bay, came readily to this Buckinghamshire Sheherazade. Lisping in numbers since his schooldays, he could now repay his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I think it can be. In his preface to Fables Ancient and Modern, which contained versions of Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio and Chaucer, Dryden wrote: ‘Troilus and Cressida was also written by a Lombard author; but much amplified by our English Translatour, as well as beautified; the Genius of our Countrymen in general being rather to improve an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The journalist might have slaughtered him. It was to sound like a scholar that he said: ‘I read Homer as I read Racine.’ In the whole of Paris there are not even twenty people who are that fluent, and some of them do it for a living. But when you are dealing with people who have never studied the aforementioned Greek they will believe you. It reminds me ...”

“... writing another history of Alexander was to provide finally a text worthy of his achievement, as Homer had for Achilles: ‘I do not think I am unworthy of the first place in Greek language as Alexander was in arms.’ Alexander was something of an obsession. In one extraordinary dream Aristides imagines finding a double tomb with one half set aside for ...”

“... in Algiers reminded him not of the Arabian Nights or similar Orientalist fantasies, but rather of Homer and accounts of women spinning wool or embroidering in a gynaeceum. Porterfield, however, unimpressed by what the painter actually says, suggests that Delacroix’s painting owed more to Orientalist cliché than it did to direct observation and that he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the vines, ravages like those of the boar that laid waste the environs of Calydon, as related by Homer in the first book of the Iliad, or those of the foxes sent by Themis to Thebes, which destroyed the fruits of the earth and the cattle’. The defence counsel, seldom able to plead alibi or mistaken identity, would invariably resort to ingeniously casuistic ...”

“... sketched beaky hybrids like these: think of the Old Person of Cromer, perched on one leg reading Homer. Jackself exists in a twilight zone of nonsense verse and fairy tale; to ascribe him a fixed identity would dispel his charm. In Dahl’s tale, the boy becomes a swan, which is impossible, but only literally. Children’s books disappear into other worlds ...”

“... and Lydgate memorialised Chaucer, as well as the distant past, in his massive Troy Book. Knowing Homer only through epitomes, the West followed Virgil in tracing its origins from the losing side. All its peoples sprang from exiles, its new polities arising in the wake of historical catastrophe. At a time when London was unofficially styled New Troy, Lydgate ...”