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“... 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 ...”

“... find himself beneath an olive tree.’ This is the pattern of myth, inherited from translations of Homer: a formulation that bears the imprint of classical grammar. The linguistic register, too, stands out from the surrounding sentences (‘awaking’, ‘beneath’). The ‘Mr da Silva’ that comes after the snatch of myth – in place of a neutral ...”

“... there. Until Freud, dreams were in the main proleptic, prophetic; they also, as we know from Homer and from Julius Caesar, contained secret knowledge of what had transpired but was still hidden from view: they were not fantastic, nor were they subjective. Classical and medieval ghosts enflesh – so to speak – concealed knowledge; it is easy to see why ...”

“... 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 ...”