“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the length of a covered walk, but Lapidge feels sure that the kind of scholarly collation of Homer which was carried out there must have required studies, or carrels, or at any rate desks and chairs. Not only has the library not survived, no one knows what happened to it. All we can say for sure is that it was destroyed sometime in antiquity, but no one ...”

“... that is being used to translate. As with other strangely interesting translations (Logue’s Homer, Pound’s Cavalcanti, Browning’s Agamemnon), these can be understood only if we keep in mind the translatedness of the words that we are reading. What is the date of composition of Dante’s Inferno as translated by Ciaran Carson? Because translations of ...”

“... you need to know (or find out from Hopkinson) what the deities in question have been up to in Homer, Athenian comedy and the poetry of Hellenistic Alexandria. Homer’s Odyssey portrays the Cyclops Polyphemus as a terrifying cannibal; the Alexandrian poet Theocritus (third century BC) playfully recasts him as a lovesick ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mathematics, philosophy and history. She became fluent in French and Italian, was translating Homer and Plato in her teens, and at 19 was learning German. Her knowledge of geology was said by the president of the Geological Society to be bold and broad. Her Unitarian background cultivated an ethos of good works inspired by a belief in the individual’s ...”

“... by the personification of black complicity in white supremacy, a chilling free black boy called Homer – sends her scrambling back on the lam. However formulaic it may be, the plot is propulsive, and the book is full of vivid images, learned allusions and astute observations, like this one about a white medical student-cum-bodysnatcher in New England: The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is true as far as it goes but too general to be revealing. The same could be said after all of Homer and Iris Murdoch. Dora tells us that Woolf’s childhood holidays in Cornwall, which inspired the setting of To the Lighthouse, belonged to an age of ‘elite seaside tourism’ that came to an end only in the 20th century with ‘the emergence of ...”

“... Kenner says that Stephen is merely ‘trying out phrases, outdoing Yeats’, or perhaps imitating Homer (Starchamber Quiry, p. 26): but Kenner is the one who has no eyes here. Joyce often expresses fascination at the incessant slight movements of water around the tidal estuary of the Liffey: consider the reappearances of the throwaway pamphlet in the ...”

“... competitive spirit, for instance, a running motif, is illustrated with examples which extend from Homer, Pindar, Plato and Thucydides to an altar at Olympia to appease a malevolent hero who causes chariots to crash, and a carpet-maker who weaves a boastful piece of self-aggrandisement into the textile itself. The cult of youth is illustrated by both a ...”