“... to the ‘real’ Hippocrates (which recalls the joke that the Iliad was written either by Homer ‘or another poet of the same name’). The language and style, and some of the patterns of thought, resemble Herodotus, who wrote in the second half of the fifth century BCE. It’s a fair guess that the treatises date to that time, and therefore belong ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mind and her work as good as my wife’s’, says Agamemnon in the manly world of Homer. ‘She kept the house and worked in wool,’ says a famous Roman epitaph. There is the stereotype of the weaker vessel: Pandora let the evil out of the bag; when women get together, they must have a mind to drink or sex (so the husbands in ...”

“... a feathered verse’, but Aristotle stands ‘firm as a castle on a hill’ for all that Horace, Homer and Virgil can do. In the end Logic tries to arrange a truce, but the effort fails dismally because her messenger, having fatally neglected the study of grammar, cannot speak plainly and never gets to the point. As the ‘authors and ...”

“... in the highly educated circles of the Greek elite under the Roman Empire. At the very top were Homer and the epic poets; and a little lower down, the historians Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, along with the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and (less congenial to modern taste) those bombastic orators Lysias and Demosthenes. What’s ...”

“... his own Spanish versions of the English texts, so in one sense there is only Borges here, no Homer and no English writer. And of course there is a great deal you can’t begin to touch by this method: rhythm, metre, idiom, peculiarities of individual languages. But in persuading us almost to forget the absence of English and Greek from his essay, Borges ...”

“... contemporary tribal societies. Gilmore gives us the well-aired rants against women from Hesiod and Homer, St Paul, Bernard of Cluny, Shakespeare and Swift to prove that his case goes beyond the merely anthropological. We hear, once again, Lear railing against ‘the sulphurous pit’, Milton moaning about ‘this fair defect of Nature’, Swift sniffing about ...”

“... of literary magpie-ism. Mann’s story is itself highly allusive, incorporating translations of Homer and Wagnerian references which connect with Winterson’s use of Tristan and Isolde. The episode recalls the Venetian escapades in The Passion. It is also a tribute to a story that addresses the nature of art. Is this a pseud’s game, or is there more to ...”

“... attention. Having decided to go about the business in this way, rather as Virgil chose to update Homer, an author could give good reasons for choosing Howards End. There are also objections to doing so. Forster’s skills are certainly a challenge to the disciple, but his narrative feats quite often relate intimately to his historical period, and some of his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the uncomfortable suspicion that there is something wrong either with Schliemann’s Troy or with Homer’s, and that there is nothing much to be done about it.’ His coda: ‘Homer did not dig.’ The same is true of those who compiled the Mahabharata. They were recounting their ancient past, events almost as far removed ...”

“... 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 ...”