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“... Nice Things to Eat, a foodie’s guide to the Mediterranean in the metre and manner of Homer (‘Sing, Muse, of the dinners, many and various’). Yet, however thick and fast the fish float by, they represent perhaps only ten lines in a thousand, which would have left plenty of room for other concerns. How would British society look, if its ...”

“... over the city people are coming out of their houses. This is the nature of Thomson’s homer. It makes people want to be in the streets, joined with others, telling others what has happened, those few who haven’t heard – comparing faces and states of mind.’ In John living’s Owen Meaney, one mythic hit (‘so unusually sharp and loud’) led ...”

“... when he writes this memoir. Hanna likes being read to, and Michael reads her his school set books: Homer, Lessing, Schiller; and after that, War and Peace. ‘Reading to her, showering with her, making love to her, and lying next to her for a while afterwards – that became the ritual in our meetings.’ But the idyll is not perfect. Hanna is subject 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... margin, viz: Rubbish! Yes, indeed! How true, how true! I don’t agree at all. Why? Yes, but cf Homer, Od., iii, 151.’ Handwritten additions to printed books can indicate attention or carelessness, can embellish a work or deface it. In crass economic terms, writing in a book may decrease its value (Jackson had to rummage through library sale rejects to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Strikes Back’, the harpist and hall forced to listen to a little demon music for a change. From Homer through Virgil and on, the descent to Hades has grown into a convention that has allowed poets to start a dialogue with the past, and with their poetic ancestry. It is also a trip that risks being merely a routine trot down the stairs for a chin-wag at the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”