“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at sight … read any easy prose Greek author, as Xenophon, Lucian, Herodotus and also Homer … then all the usual common Latin schoolbooks … to read at sight Virgil, Horace, Caesar’s Commentaries … you should be able to write pretty correctly Latin prose – and a Greek play or two should be added. It was not, perhaps, surprising that the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the full pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses and parroting the ‘acknowledged authority’ on Homer are all forms of performative smartness that ‘the Cry think necessary towards shining in conversation’, the narrator observes; they are also yardsticks for judging and deriding the lesser brilliance of others. ‘If any person had forgot who was the ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... mythic’ (‘linoshaft mythisch’), linking him with a figure whose death, according to Homer, inaugurated the history of lament. For Rilke, Linos and his modern incarnation are Orphic beings, poets who by their sacrifice produce art from silence. This notion informs Rilke’s own mythology, the heroic scenery of death in the last Duino Elegy, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and so on. Only to be upstaged by the final, and instantly recognisable, figure of ‘Homer Simpsoane’, who (obviously having read Darley’s frank biography) has no trouble at all in identifying this obsessive and sadistic father as ‘the first Dysfunctionalist’. The 20th-century enthusiasm for Soane’s work might seem to be just another ...”

“... work of the great Hudson River School painters of the early 19th, or of Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer in the late 19th, or of the Ash Can School in turn of the century New York. Like those earlier Americans, they wanted to make the point that their themes were indigenous, not borrowed from the Old World. At the turn of the century, on the other hand, John ...”