“... by which we accept life and open our arms to its basic situations. All good writers, from Homer to Hemingway, have their own versions of it. If we accept his definition, all art would be as full of kitsch – the stereotyped formula of gracious living – as any Hollywood or Soviet film. What matters, surely, as he also recognises, is the purpose ...”

“... student, he uses masterly work to give him a structure (as, he notes, Joyce used Vico and Homer) – but tends to stretch or reduce. As one of his SF characters says: ‘You love him as a chunk of raw material you think you can mould.’ It is in exactly that way, of course, that some of us like Burgess’s work: as he determinedly instructs us (about ...”

“... whether the perceived benefit is to get well or to get high. After the Trojan War, according to Homer, Helen gave Telemachus a draught of nepenthe – almost certainly a reference to a Theban opium – to ‘banish memories’ and ‘calm grief and anger’. I am not sure whether this was medical or recreational. The use of hallucinogens in mystical and ...”

“... to grow that fancy lay not in the heart but in the head. The Mesopotamians, the Hebrews and Homer identified thought with the heart, and the brain, a mushy grey-cream mass to the casual eye, was regarded as an inconveniently heavy and ill-placed gland. Plato and Galen regarded the head as the seat of rationality, but Aristotle, that object lesson in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... person. There is more than a whiff here of that traditional antithesis (of which every age since Homer seems to throw up a variant instance) between the gentlemanly valour of skilled personal fighting and the mean upstart butchery of the missile weapon, or whatever new refinement of it calls for revision of received notions of gallantry at any given ...”

“... all day in various interesting postures of jouissance, dressed in loose crimson garments, reciting Homer to one another and sipping absinthe. And that was just the working day. There are problems with this vision, as there are with any ethics. Are all your powers to be realised? What about that obsessive desire to beat up Tony Blair? Or should one realise ...”

“... I also suspect that chiefly novelists enter this kind of dream, that those who think of reading Homer or Dante are more likely actually to read them. This may be because novels themselves involve quite a lot of day-dreaming, a lot of associative world-making, whereas poems, even long poems, usually get us to concentrate firmly on the language and the matter ...”

“... except a very modest scale, they do not concur with our intuitions, for we freely admit that Homer, Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Tolstoy are full of inconsistencies, and do not allow this to worry us. Secondly, we can distinguish theories which identify unity with an overall impression or a gestalt of the work from those which make a claim about the ...”

“... fine conversation with Aldous Huxley on ‘a favourite topic: the poorness of all literature’: Homer was terribly overrated, Dante was hopelessly limited, Shakespeare was such a stupid man, Goethe was such a bore, Tolstoy was silly etc. We had disposed of nearly everybody, and Aldous was really enjoying himself – until a nasty doubt struck him: ‘What ...”

“... of disaster itself. ‘Los Angeles is the city we love to destroy,’ Davis writes. Since Homer Lea inaugurated Los Angeles disaster fiction in 1909 with The Valour of Ignorance, his yellow-peril fantasy of Japanese invasion, Los Angeles has been destroyed, by Davis’s count, 138 times: 49 times by nuclear bombs, 28 by earthquakes and 10 by invasion ...”