“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In Germany, together with Auden and, to a lesser extent, Stephen Spender, Isherwood embraced Homer Lane’s ‘doctrine of original virtue’, which held that ‘there is only one sin: disobedience to the inner law of our own nature.’ Every English inhibition must be de-repressed. In Germany the ‘gang’ formed a masonic – or, in Isherwood’s ...”

“... matter of luck, but the signs point to Euripides’ popularity in antiquity. He is second only to Homer and Demosthenes in the number of ancient copies of his texts that survive. All three were regularly read at school in antiquity. Still, we have lost far more of Euripides than we will ever recover.Until the discovery at Philadelphia, Polyidus was known to ...”

“... 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 ...”