“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... took the oath of office as president and Mellon resigned his ambassadorship. Within months, Homer Cummings, the attorney general, told reporters that he intended to look into charges that Mellon had under-reported his income and underpaid his income tax – the same accusation Mellon had made against Senator Couzens a decade earlier. Mellon spent 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 ...”

“... points as we drive past.CyCy has big gnarled paws and a voice like a buttock. He has been reading Homer and got some ideas. He doesn’t so much tell me his ideas as carve me with them. Cy is a Special Level Donor. He’ll up the annual donation by half if they get artists doing some real art not just bullshit brushstrokes.GilesCy’s son is deaf. He brings ...”

“... He asked Harrison which her favourite Greek author was. The prudent answer would have been ‘Homer’, Gladstone’s own favourite, but – to annoy, and not wholly truthfully – she replied ‘Euripides’, then notorious for his religious scepticism. Gladstone stomped off. And years later, when she had added to her existing duties regular stints as a ...”

“... Underworld, Tony talks about the Dodgers gaining revenge for Bobby Thomson’s heartbreaking homer at the end of the previous season. Tóibín’s novel takes its own gentle revenge on DeLillo’s triumphant home run of a novel. It does so by presenting, with quiet accomplishment, an interested immigrant’s view of a sporting contest in which ‘luck ...”

“... a scrupulous failure from a simple failure. Is it reasonable to limp in order to show that Homer or Henryson runs? Not always, obviously; but it certainly can be, especially when a translation makes a reader hear that the words they are reading are not quite the words of the original. So sometimes a Heaney half-rhyme can invoke the ghost of a Scots ...”

“... on Mount Olympus. Unlike the savage destruction taking place on the human battlefield below, Homer’s theomachy is an inconsequential farce, complete with name-calling and tearful outbursts. The gods are incapable of mortal wounding, and so their warring carries no import. This is a satire, not a human drama. If the Olympian gods show us what lives ...”

“... paradoxes. They’re an expression of the narrator (who’s complex, nuanced, a man who quotes Homer and Shakespeare to explain how he feels), and they reflect what he learns about the nature of truth (hard to find, hard to articulate and hard to bear). The most telling paradox comes at the high point of his lobbying for information: ‘My father never ...”

“... the Sumerians four thousand years ago. The most celebrated, and familiar, of these is the racing homer, a breed selected for its unrivalled navigational abilities. Once their enclosure, or loft, has been imprinted on them – something that happens when a bird is around six weeks old – homing pigeons will return to it for the rest of their lives, even ...”

“... languages of antiquity: ‘Beginning with a mere smattering of the Greek conjunctions, I procured Homer, with a translation, and learned him all in 21 days. I learned grammar exclusively from observation of the relation of Homer’s words to each other; indeed, I made my own grammar of the poetic dialect as I went ...”