“... 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 ...”

“... like the Greeks, and American Modernists such as Eliot or Pound are compelled to make reference to Homer or Goethe, to Shakespeare or the Italian Renaissance, skipping over the trite insignificance of the Yankee’s proximate world to embrace the past. Perhaps only in its very broadest dimensions is Fender’s analysis familiar from the scholarly literature on ...”

“... story is that Shakespeare is the greatest: ‘he had no rivals, ancient or modern.’ Admirers of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe or anyone else, see ye the error of your ways, and repent: abandon your idols, and worship the one true god. Fraser devotes three and a half pages (pages 170-74) to the whole of Jacobean drama, brusquely dismissing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the sake of fairness … Aeneas was not as pious as Virgil depicts him, or Ulysses as prudent as Homer describes him.’ ‘That is true,’ the friend says, ‘but it is one thing to write as a poet and another to write as a historian.’ Here we have history as hard knocks, which is exactly how one of Rushdie’s characters regards reality when defined by ...”

“... that experience: on the Nile he reads the Odyssey; at Ephesus he notes, ‘I’m thinking of Homer’; at Thermopylae he whips out Plutarch on Leonidas, and so on. But consider also what happens when all this eventually passes into one of his own fictions, L’Education sentimentale: Il voyagea. Il connut la mélancolie des paquebots, les froids ...”

“... and excesses even as they profited from it. Pope’s fantastically lucrative translation of Homer is only the most obvious example.What did ordinary readers make of it all? Reading It Wrong considers the pervasive 18th-century habit of disguising names in passages of lampoon, either to impede prosecution for seditious libel or scandalum magnatum ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the reason in a letter of passionate sympathy to his cousin. ‘Everyone knows Marx’s opinion of Homer.’ The regime, in fact, as in so much else, was trying to have things both ways. We must have scholarship on obscure topics, but it must be researched and produced so that everyone can understand it in relation to existing ideological and party ...”

“... living counterpart in Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus, with their loyal slaves – an oikos that Homer sets in deliberate contrast to Clytemnestra’s love affair with Aegisthus and the murder of Agamemnon. The previous achievements of distant ancestors and close relatives are detailed in the special odes commissioned to celebrate victory in the great ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”