“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... omniscience is to fill up his text with riddles and paradoxes. His claims for Verne as the ‘Homer of the 19th Century’ (on the grounds that he is ‘less an individual than a style, a symbol, a mythology’) may seem disastrously overblown. (Has Martin not read Moby Dick, one wonders?) Nevertheless, the critical agility on display in The Mask of the ...”

“... convincingly in relation to the contemporary discoveries of ‘simplicity and wildness’ in Homer as well as in the Highlands. Stafford shows that Macpherson, who as a child witnessed ‘the humiliation of his Chief and Clan’ in the aftermath of Culloden, might have had some reason to ‘see the world of his childhood as a lost paradise’ – even ...”

“... to specialised sorts of updating in their own verse. Logue in particular, with his versions of Homer, is engaged in the often valuable as well as always fashionable business of bringing the past in line with the tastes of the present. But Musa and Fitzgerald have done something more fundamentally worthwhile, as well as truly educational, which is to enable ...”

“... dependent labour, and to the essay on technical innovation. The three articles on ‘Mycenae and Homer’ are more than the others reserved for the specialist, but should be read for the sheer intellectual pleasure of following the intricate argument. I have some scattered comments on the remaining. The opening essay on the ancient city is more ...”

“... critics are now complaining. He would be unrepentant, perhaps citing Heraclitus once more: ‘Homer was wrong in saying: “Would that strife might perish from among gods and men.” He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe: for if his prayers were heard, all things would pass ...”

“... with a civilised, mock-heroic rejection of epic action. And the link Friel establishes with Homer serves to remind his audience of Joyce’s epic, Ulysses, which was published in 1922, the year when civil war broke out in Ireland. Just as Dryden translates Virgil in a Homeric manner, so Joyce’s ‘imitation’ of the Odyssey has fundamental affinities ...”

“... Or did the sensitive neoteric fail to keep control when describing epic carnage and go beyond Homer himself? An unwelcome hypothesis. Or are the lines to be blamed on the tastelessness of the Fates? This is Jenkyns’s idea, yet it hardly provides an answer, for what the Fates say is true, and Catullus would still be stressing the presence of hideous ...”

“... to a living body’. It is also regularly used of a corpse throughout Greek literature, from Homer onwards. They do not regard their hypothesis as proven, only as extremely probable, but they add that they have abundant evidence that the Prieuré de Sion can provide conclusive proof. Perhaps the publication of this book will lead the Prieuré to disclose ...”

“... readers.’ And yet Emerson wants more, even if he cannot quite name the desire: Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendour of meaning that plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore a second and ...”

“... planned out with circles and arrows and allusions to Callimachus and maybe in grislier moments to Homer; and c) quite apart from the fact that the text of Catullus is a conjectural amender’s paradise, with lacunae and all kinds of textual S&M to be performed on it for the pleasure, or possibly the pain, of both the poet and the critic, his words often seem ...”

“... 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 ...”