Big Daddy

Linda Nochlin, 30 October 1997

American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America 
by Robert Hughes.
Harvill, 635 pp., £35, October 1997, 9781860463723
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... juste milieu side of the spectrum: his heroes are Copley, Cole and Church; St Gaudens, Eakins and Homer; Frank Lloyd Wright and Edward Hopper. When it comes to abstract art, his likings tend to be predictable: nobody could be considered a maverick nowadays for admiring Jackson Pollock or David Smith, and Hughes’s heart clearly belongs to the least ...

Promises, Promises

Erin Maglaque: The Love Plot, 21 April 2022

Love: A History in Five Fantasies 
by Barbara Rosenwein.
Polity, 220 pp., £20, October 2021, 978 1 5095 3183 7
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... 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 ...

On the Sands

Anne Enright: At Sandymount Strand, 26 May 2022

... 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 ...

In Praise of Barley Brew

E.S. Turner: Combustible Belloc, 20 February 2003

Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc 
by Joseph Pearce.
HarperCollins, 306 pp., £20, July 2002, 0 00 274095 8
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... Paris in a house which only weeks later was sacked by the Prussians. At 12 he was in love with Homer. Already he was disturbed by the Victorian drift to doubt. Aged 21, still a Frenchman, he served a year in the French artillery. At Oxford he became president of the Union and was hailed ‘the Balliol Demosthenes’. All Souls’ refusal to grant him a ...

Why We Weep

Peter de Bolla: Looking and Feeling, 6 March 2003

Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings 
by James Elkins.
Routledge, 272 pp., £14.99, October 2001, 0 415 93713 2
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... to something more rarefied). So we arrive at the (for the conservative, woeful) position that Homer is no better than hip-hop. The culturally progressive proponent of the view that anything can be art may be delighted at the freedom this gives us and the seeming democratisation of the realm of culture, but the observation which follows on from there ...

Worrying Wives

Helen King: The Invention of Sparta, 7 August 2003

Spartan Women 
by Sarah Pomeroy.
Oxford, 198 pp., £45, July 2002, 0 19 513066 9
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... in order to make Sparta seem more opposed to the norms of Greek life. As for the mirror handles, Homer called Sparta the ‘land of beautiful women’, famous for their height and their healthy good looks; most famous of all was Helen, who was ‘of Sparta’ before she became ‘of Troy’. Aristotle wrote that female excellence was best expressed in ...

Best Known for His Guzzleosity

Helen Hackett: Shakespeare’s Authors, 11 March 2010

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? 
by James Shapiro.
Faber, 367 pp., £20, April 2010, 978 0 571 23576 6
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... 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 ...

Hot Flanks and Her Sisters

James Romm: Amazons, 22 October 2015

The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World 
by Adrienne Mayor.
Princeton, 512 pp., £19.95, October 2014, 978 0 691 14720 8
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... 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 ...

Don’t be a braying ass

Peter Green: Callimachus, 20 December 2012

Callimachus in Context 
by Benjamin Acosta-Hughes and Susan Stephens.
Cambridge, 344 pp., £60, January 2012, 978 1 107 00857 1
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Brill’s Companion to Callimachus 
edited by Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Luigi Lehnus and Susan Stephens.
Brill, 726 pp., £160, July 2011, 978 90 04 15673 9
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Aetia 
translated and edited by Annette Harder.
Oxford, 362 pp.. and 1061 pp., £225, May 2012, 978 0 19 958101 6
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... That he was taken seriously, at least by an intellectual minority, there can be no doubt. Homer apart, no other writer is more quoted by ancient grammarians, philologists, critics, metricians, editors or lexicographers. As I wrote long ago in Alexander to Actium (1993) – this gives a hint of the main reason he has so far failed to catch on with ...

With Slip and Slapdash

Frank Kermode: Auden’s Prose, 7 February 2008

The Complete Works of W.H. Auden. Vol. III: Prose, 1949-55 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 779 pp., £29.95, December 2007, 978 0 691 13326 3
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... sin, but by the law.’ He always had gurus – Gerald Heard, Charles Williams, Georg Groddeck, Homer Lane. Some quietly faded away, but with a few he enjoyed an enduring sympathy: Forster and Virginia Woolf, for instance, and Eliot, with the respect due to the publisher of his first book of poems, but staying well short of idolatry. Such connections ...

Be like the Silkworm

Terry Eagleton: Marx’s Style, 29 June 2023

Marx’s Literary Style 
by Ludovico Silva, translated by Paco Brito Núñez.
Verso, 104 pp., £14.99, January, 978 1 83976 553 7
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... crap’ was keeping him from writing his big book on Balzac. His work is studded with allusions to Homer, Sophocles, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe and scores of other authors, though he was less enthralled by ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet’ Edmund Spenser, an advocate of state terror in Ireland. One of his most ardent antagonists on the ...

Short Cuts

Richard J. Williams: Motorway Cities, 5 December 2024

... the inner ring road as imagined in 1965. There’s a lot of street art here, some of it very good. Homer Simpson leers out from one of the concrete piers holding up the roadway. In Tradeston the elevated motorway, painted French blue, punches its way through the landscape like a big piece of land art. I don’t mind it, at least as an urban spectacle. The area ...

I have gorgeous hair

Emily Wilson: Epictetus says relax, 1 June 2023

The Complete Works: Handbook, Discourses and Fragments 
by Epictetus, translated by Robin Waterfield.
Chicago, 460 pp., £44, October 2022, 978 0 226 76933 2
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... to show how the organ was used in divination.) The Discourses are also full of references to Homer and Greek tragedy, and provide a fascinating insight into the way these works were interpreted by at least one ancient reader. Epictetus tells us a great deal about Achilles’ intense and – from a Stoic perspective – excessive suffering after the death ...

Lumps of Cram

Colin Kidd: University English, 14 August 2025

Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain 
by Stefan Collini.
Oxford, 648 pp., £35, April, 978 0 19 880018 7
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... than a hypothetical academic discipline structured around an international ‘supercanon’ of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton and Goethe. Aware of the fatuousness of treating a single discipline in isolation, Collini traces the emergence of English in the interplay between academic subjects. The gradual ebbing of classics – once synonymous ...

American Manscapes

Richard Poirier, 12 October 1989

Manhood and the American Renaissance 
by David Leverenz.
Cornell, 372 pp., $35.75, April 1989, 0 8014 2281 7
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... impingement on those works of English or Classical works wherein manhood is at issue – as in Homer, Spenser, Marlowe, the Shakespeare of Coriolanus, the Milton of Paradise Lost, Byron, Shelley, Fielding and Scott. Most of these were more widely read in pre-Civil War America than were any male American writers. With some notable exceptions early on, like ...