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“... 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 ...”

“... of an ordinary day in Dublin, but also replicates a structure of meaning found originally in Homer’s epic. This replication can be said to fulfil a ‘figure’ found in Homer, just as the New Testament replicates and thereby ‘fulfils’ the Old Testament by referring the events of Jesus’s life to the ...”

“... opening of a new world to him, and I believe he felt as Keats felt when he first read Chapman’s Homer.’ The only wild surmise which visited Joplin, who remained in America, required him to avert his gaze from the New World he already inhabited, and to look back across the Atlantic. Wasn’t Europe where the ‘spring of art’ itself was to be found? Most ...”

“... literary critics interested in the ‘heroic societies’ or ‘honour cultures’ described in Homer and the Greek tragedies, or in the medieval Icelandic sagas that Miller, a professor of law, has made an object of special study. Humiliation is harder, and has received much less attention. Miller’s discussion of it seems much more curious and disputable ...”

“... The spread is enormous; the treatment is necessarily selective: for example, ten pages on Homer, six on Hesiod, nine on Plato, 12 on Virgil, 20 on Enoch, 17 on St Paul, two and a half on the Gospel of John. Bernstein’s task is easier, and he does understandably better, when his author has a coherent and argued view. But his prose accounts of heroic ...”