“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rebuttal in these dialogues. There is an exaltation of warfare, already implicit in Heraclitus and Homer, but more openly vehement than in any other modern thinker. There is the famous apologia for capital punishment, for the metaphysical dignitas of the executioner’s trade. Throughout, the keynote is that of ‘chastisement’, of history and social ...”

“... as children did in those far-off days. How does this square with the sophisticated reader of Homer and Racine, read in the original; with the lecturer to the St Anne’s Society on ‘Some Impediments to Christian Commitment’; with the acute reviewer of so many new novels, good and bad, over the years for so many periodicals? Literary editors didn’t ...”

“... what MacIntyre sees as three different traditions of Western ethical thought: one running from Homer to Aristotle and passing through Arab and Jewish writers to St Thomas Aquinas; another, Biblical, tradition that came to Aquinas from St Augustine; and a third that informed Scottish thought in the 17th and 18th centuries. The studies of these various ...”

“... the standard version of the poem (in Akkadian), perhaps around 1200 BC, considerably before Homer got to work on his better-known epics. But even after this, new variants came into the text, and there may never have been a canonical version of the poem in the sense that we would recognise. Nevertheless, most of the story of Gilgamesh can now be ...”

“... normally the order of the day. MacDiarmid as an impenitent Leninist will have none of that:   Homer, Plato, Plotinus, Catullus, Horace, and scores of others of whom ‘the ordinary people’ know nothing are nevertheless immortal.   ‘The ordinary people’ do learn a little about some of the great figures in literature during their school years, but ...”

“... things ‘dualise’ between being and not-being. Dualisers are popular in folklore. In Homer, the souls of the dead twitter like bats in a cave. Aesop’s fable of the bat and the weasel turns on the dualising nature of the bat. Bats’ hearts keep ants at bay. Bat’s blood will prevent girls’ breasts from prematurely swelling – and it will ...”

“... feasible. She saw the possibility first in great singers and actresses – women such as Louise Homer and Olive Fremstad. Her lifelong devotion to music is explained by O’Brien as an affection for art which has ‘a text without words ... nothing is named’ – like ‘intense friendships with other women which were never named’. The female voice she ...”