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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Epic poetry is full of names, a fair number of which must have been made up by the poet, and both Homer and Hesiod occasionally turned their talents to the construction of lines composed of next to nothing but names, of sea-nymphs for example, beautifully fitted to the noble metre. In Theogony Hesiod names 50 nereids in a virtuoso performance of nearly ...”

“... on the way to FDR’s inauguration, Walsh had a heart attack and died. The new Attorney-General, Homer Cummings, was a very different man: like Mencken, he realised that in the US, the crime business was, above all else, a branch of show business.Americans were divided by ethnicity, religion, colour and language – but when the good lawman overcame the ...”

“... holy places, Delphi, Didyma, Claros, as of visions whether seen in dream or waking. Ever since Homer it had been believed that on rare occasions the divine might be glimpsed in human disguise and Lane Fox aptly reminds us of the incident in the Acts of the Apostles when Barnabas and Paul are mistaken for Zeus and Hermes. Often seeing and hearing were ...”

“... of someone quite other – the ageing Salvador Dali, various characters in paintings by Winslow Homer, or Deedee’s woman friend who tells her ‘an aluminium casket would be a good idea.’ It is a poetry not unrelated to Murray’s, though on a smaller scale and less firmly centred, and whose nearest or largest forebear must surely be the later Auden. A ...”