“... 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 ...”

“... another. The fishermen are rendered in the stoic, grimly foreboding, 19th-century tones of Winslow Homer: ‘silent-toiling, autonomous gil-netters’. The women, who never go out to sea, are strong and rational, as we learn in this Bridges of Madison County-like passage: ‘She understood the happiness of a place where the work was clear and there were fields ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... long been preoccupied by the idea of writing an epic in a woman’s voice. In an essay called ‘Homer’s Art’ (1990), she speculates that it might be possible for a woman to recover ‘some sense of what mind was like before Homer, before the world went haywire & women were denied participation in the design & making ...”

“... was far from the first patron of the arts in the ancient world, or even in Rome. Homer describes bards singing for a place at court, and lyric poets wrote songs for autocrats all over the Greek world. The poet Ennius (b.239 bce) benefited from the support of Roman statesmen and generals. His Annales, the great epic of Rome before Virgil’s ...”

“... is a chained-up bear: half-size, scraggly and dull in the eyes, kept alive on dog food. Homer Campbell, who runs the general store upriver and sells limp carrots to the locals, tells Lou there has always been one on the estate. As keeper of the house, as investigator of its long line of owners, it will also be her duty to care for this ...”

“... assimilates the authorship controversy to radical theories about the non-existence of Homer as an individual author, and about the mythic nature of the Gospels. The thirst to find evidence for the sort of Shakespeare people wanted produced the forgeries of William-Henry Ireland in the 1790s (which included a letter from Elizabeth I thanking him ...”

“... excavations at Mycenae and Troy. But accumulating evidence has made it clear that, just as Homer didn’t invent the Trojan War, the Greeks didn’t invent the Amazons: they embellished reports they received, or observations they made, of high-caste warrior women among the peoples to their north and east. They projected their fears and fantasies about ...”

“... that her love fantasies follow a predictable pattern. Each chapter begins with some combination of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero or Augustine. As we might expect from a medieval historian, she then looks at texts from early Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David ...”

“... first episode of Ulysses is set. I resent that his ‘snot green’ – which is just a joke about Homer – has persisted as a description of the sea here. A mile up the road is the house in Glasthule where the real playwright J.M. Synge lived and the fictional Stephen Dedalus pissed against the hall door – unless, as he says, it was ...”

“... is already sounded by Dryden, who styles Jonson the Virgil of English drama to Shakespeare’s Homer, and adds tellingly: ‘I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.’ This perhaps articulates the basic problem. You cannot quite love Ben Jonson. In fact, sometimes you’re not sure if you even like him. There were plenty who didn’t at the time. There is a ...”