“... 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 ...”

“... to scratch your head too hard to come up with the New Yorker. A distinguished musician, called Homer in the novel, says exactly what White, in his Introduction to a 1994 reprint of A Boy’s Own Story, says Virgil Thomson said to him. A well-known poet, who figures largely in The Farewell Symphony, makes a Spoonerist joke on the subject of a Japanese ...”

“... than a crony of Athenian aristocrats who were apt to see themselves as the heirs of the heroes of Homer, and resented being governed by the common man. Stone has no time for pedigrees, and less for the Greeks of the Heroic Age; Achilles was a ‘cry-baby’, and Odysseus a schemer and a trickster, as well as a part-time pirate. The motives of those who ...”

“... adorns his scientific observation. His evocation of a narwhal’s ‘sea-washed back’ echoes Homer, a reminder of the ‘sea-shouldering whales’ that Keats so admired. The first-hand observations and densely packed detail ground Lopez’s polemical project. Arctic Dreams is in part a series of dispatches on despoliation, the consequences of ‘the ...”

“... poet; but I do not see how we can assert that it is a higher and fuller form than that used by Homer or that used by Dante. Even the most capacious of the ancient genres, epic and tragedy, are vantage-points from which certain things – and only certain things – can be seen and shown; other vantage-points, those of epigram or comedy (or lyric), are ...”

“... guessed (the ancient world didn’t normally eat meat – it’s part of the superman image of Homer’s heroes that they eat it every day); there was also the universal fish sauce (made from concentrated brine), and ‘axle grease’, the pork fat which you used to cook food or treat frost-bite. The tablets themselves represent another tribute to ...”

“... it came out of Kafka’s waistcoat, but for the fact that it probably has as many provenances as Homer: Borges, Pirandello, Beckett ... It is perfectly engrossing, bred by plausibility out of a vacuum. Everything flows from its opening sentence: ‘For many years now I have been living in an old flat in the heart of the city with my brother, who is ...”

“... open the possibility of a continuation or that the work is unfinished or has lost its conclusion; Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Lucretius, and Virgil’s Aeneid could be cited. Kings comes to a very abrupt ending; Jonah and Acts would be easily extensible. Modern readers take too much for granted the well-finished ending. Having thus alerted us to the dangers of ...”

“... Abraham! and he said, Behold, here I am.’ Even this opening startles us when we come to it from Homer. Where are the two speakers? We are not told. The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from ...”

“... with people who went clinically insane (Henry Jacob, John Leland, William Price), with claims that Homer was born near Caerphilly and that Britain was evangelised not by any Roman mission but by St Paul in person, and with amiable innocents and the fraudsters who preyed on them. Blood and Mistletoe certainly proves, as Hutton’s earlier works have also ...”

“... remarks, a ‘cogently worked through universe of thought’ that puts its author on a level with Homer, Plato, Dante and Shakespeare. Turner sees a theological meaning in its incompleteness. Like the world in Thomas’s understanding of it, this finest of all works of theology is shot through with silence. Turner makes much of what one might call the ...”

“... were not enough, their earliest prose and verse histories, which recall the substance or metre of Homer and were even on occasion written in Greek, thoroughly naturalised Aeneas in a hoary Latin landscape, marrying him off to Lavinia the daughter of ‘Latinus’ and, after filling in a few hundred years with some colourless ‘Alban kings’, making him the ...”

“... and when he finished it he seems to have felt about it much as Chapman did on finishing his Homer: ‘The work that I was born to do is done.’ He said repeatedly that the publication of the final volume left him nothing more to do; he would now (at 71) ‘do nothing for ever and ever’. In his well-known essay on Housman, Edmund Wilson made a special ...”