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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... An anonymous mock-epic of 1744, The Machine, or Love’s Preservative (‘In Imitation of Homer and Virgil, and Dryden and Pope’), took the colonel as its hero: ‘In cundum’s Praise/I sing.’ The poem attacks those stupid enough to venture ‘all unarm’d to th’ hostile Field’:Happy the Man, in whose close Pocket’s found,Whether with ...”

“... what we see is what there is, without pernicious seeming. The heroes of Fisher’s inquiry are Homer and Shakespeare, with Aristotle as philosophical spokesman. The repressive forces are the Stoics and the modern middle class, indeed modern life itself in its preference for displacement, therapy, compromise and the suppression or calculated restraint of ...”