“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Scottish heritage: ‘I would sooner be the Author of Tam o shanter then of the Iliad & Odyssey of Homer,’ he wrote in 1820). Though Clare modelled himself partly after Bloomfield, he ‘cannot be called a peasant poet’, Edward Thomas argued in 1917, as his work relies primarily on literary models.Some of Clare’s best imitations have their origin in a ...”

“... to the world’. With devastating mischief – failures of alchemy indeed – Borges suggests Homer and Dante may have reached the same insight. Borges’s poem ‘El Otro Tigre’/‘The Other Tiger’ concerns the beast that is not in the poem, that couldn’t be in the poem because it is not made of words or tropes and because even the act of naming it ...”

“... cast of Ginsberg’s peers, junk dependents and boyfriends. The publisher’s closest familiar was Homer, more bear than dog, a lolloping collie/schnauzer compromise with an apologetic bark. The Ferlinghetti beard seemed to get a little greyer in successive video clips. His ice-blue eyes shone out of a sea fret of put-upon benevolence. The tolerated ...”

“... to Dante: Poet of the Secular World, said that man’s character was his fate. The heroes in Homer and in the Greek tragedies had fates and finally met them. Then character and fate came apart in later Greek philosophy, Auerbach says, and stayed apart in the West until first Virgil then Dante put them together again. Character and fate: particularity and ...”

“... opened a new world to me. When I got home’ – he was one of the lucky ones – ‘I purchased Homer’s works.’ Whether they made any difference to Sapper Gale, or to any of his upper-middle-class betters once the true nature of the campaign became apparent, is doubtful. It is noticeable that the classical allusions thin out as the war goes on. The ...”

“... of the learned Alexandrian poet Callimachus rather than the shaggy old style of ancient Ennius or Homer. As he grew older Propertius even claimed to be the Roman Callimachus (for which Horace may have teased him). After about 16 BC he seems to have stopped writing, and after the sparkle died he did too.But there was much fun on the way. Propertius can be ...”