“... 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 ...”

“... Beauties of the Bosphorus (seven out of eight quarto volumes of steel engravings), the works of Homer, Milton, Sir Walter Scott, and so on and on and on. Not exactly a treasure trove, but getting so many books at once, with so few titles I would have chosen, moved me suddenly much closer to possession of my fantasy library. Some of the books were hard going ...”

“... the Rihlah whirls. ‘The Travels,’ Mackintosh-Smith writes, ‘is a DIY Odyssey by a homespun Homer and the yarn, as elastic as its spinner, is prone to stretch alarmingly.’ In line with contemporary literary practice, Ibn Juzayy used the works of earlier authorities (notably the 12th-century Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr) to flesh out his master’s ...”

“... governors of the Republic. You had to eat what you were given and not spare it a second thought. Homer had it right, Plato reckoned, when he ‘feeds his heroes at their feasts, when they are campaigning, on soldiers’ fare; they have no fish, although they are on the shores of the Hellespont, and they are not allowed boiled meats but only roast, which is ...”

“... finished, here we are at the very end etc etc. What mind of any strength – beginning with Homer – has ever come to a conclusion? Scepticism of that all-embracing order is the attitude that the weak-minded B. and P. are of course to be denied: they jump daily not to their own conclusions, but to those of the authorities and the opinion-formers of ...”

“... use as a collective threat from outsiders. The ‘silent majority’ (a phrase Nixon borrowed from Homer, who was referring to the dead) refused to acknowledge that prohibitionist legislation and its enforcement are indispensable preconditions for the growth of illicit supply. ‘In a repressive climate of this kind, more informal modes of regulation – which ...”

“... abstruse) Dialectic of Enlightenment traced ‘Enlightenment’ thinking back to the age of Homer. Foucault recast 18th-century Europe as the scene of a dramatic break in Western habits of thought, and darkly associated it with new, menacingly ubiquitous patterns of discipline and repression. Subsequent authors have often mistaken these radical ...”

“... beguiling Merlin. Maria apparently wanted them to run away together to an island mentioned in Homer, and he seems to have entertained this notion quite seriously, but couldn’t finally bring himself to take the leap. The crisis came when she responded to his wavering by threatening suicide. There was a violent scuffle near the Regent’s Canal, as he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as documentary. It’s the same with any group portrait, whether it is Ingres’s Apotheosis of Homer or the latest colour-mag line-up of the Best of Young British Novelists. Who’s new, who’s hot, who’s good, who’s not going to cut the mustard? The critical triage starts immediately. I remember lining up with my fellow Young Novelists of 1983, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an intriguing item,’ which Baines and Rogers ‘have not been able to identify’, surely means Homer Defended, an anonymous critique of Pope’s Iliad translation that Curll advertised in 1716). In his preface to The Case of Seduction: Being, An Account of the Late Proceedings . . . against the Reverend Abbée, Claudius Nicholas des Rues, for Committing ...”

“... exported classical ballet and classical music to prove its superiority: the US sent out Winslow Homer, Gershwin and the Boston Symphony. But in the end it wasn’t high culture that established the cultural supremacy of the US: in classical music and in ballet, the Soviet Union and its East European satellites could more than hold their own. In the long ...”

“... His new book, a vastly ambitious attempt to cover nearly every aspect of anger in antiquity from Homer to early Christianity, breaks fresh ground again. Despite a somewhat rambling organisation and quirky remarks like the one just quoted (what’s the evidence for neolithic views on revenge?), it is full of interest. Harris’s only serious omission is anger ...”