“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... change in European history been so decisively charted. It was Southern rather than Charles Homer Haskins, inventor of the term ‘12th-century Renaissance’, who really established that this Renaissance was for most purposes more significant than Burckhardt’s in casting the European mould. He was not much concerned with frontiers, other than in the ...”

“... Athens, however, fewer than two hundred years separate Pisistratus, who established the text of Homer and prescribed it for study in the schools, from Plato, whose ideal curriculum banished mythological study. Plato argues in the Republic that, since only good can come from the gods, the traditional tales of the Greek gods and heroes cannot be true; and ...”

“... W.E. Gladstone, who argued that the Greeks must, on the evidence of a paucity of colour terms in Homer, have lived in a chromatically impoverished world. But the human genome, specified for colour perception, has not changed in far more thousands of years than the few separating us from the age of Agamemnon, and the human eye, with its incredible sensitivity ...”

“... logical and, in its logicality, absurd. In Beyond Richards considers a sequence of texts: Homer, the Book of Job, Plato, Dante, Shelley, essentially religious in their bearing. Its governing impulse is in its concern with ‘the Scripture over us’, the texts that adumbrate the other, the ideal and the possibility of survival beyond death – a topic ...”

“... which is an exercise in canon-formation on the large scale, surveying as it does the Yahwist, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Blake and Wordsworth, and moving into our own century, where the light falls on Freud, Kafka and Beckett. What holds these diverse writers together is their ‘strength’, which refers less frequently now to their revisionary powers ...”

“... literature or (still more obviously) of Classics. No one before the Sixties wrote narratologies of Homer, or even of Jane Austen. Biblical scholars have been slow to jump on the bandwagon, but now they are running as fast as they can to catch it. And in the study of ancient literature ‘excavative’ procedures do not necessarily represent the imposition of ...”

“... to Murder Me’, the poet-persona revisits his seven-year-old self, I sit in the garden reading Homer, shy lad under a folding one-man tent and daddy                   wants to murder me. The daemonic insecurity of the writing has its origins in this malevolent father, ‘Mr Not Sit Him On Your Knee’, who metamorphoses into an ...”

“... of 1915. Meanwhile, intellectuals like Blyden and the Ghanaian Casely Hayford were able to draw on Homer and the myth of Prester John to build the term into a symbol of pan-Africanism, linking it with independent black churches in the United States and with the ‘back to Africa’ movement. By 1911, when Casely Hayford published his Ethiopia Unbound, the name ...”

“... Swift sent Gulliver on a visit to the afterworld of Glubbdubdrib, one of the sights was that of Homer and Aristotle among their innumerable mob of commentators, both of them ‘perfect Strangers to the rest of the Company’. There are people one does not know, just as there are things beneath one’s notice. As Pope said in ‘An Essay on ...”