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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... men who has ever lived. He could paint, draw and write almost as well as he could compose. He read Homer in Greek and spoke half a dozen other languages. He had a curatorial flair, playing a large part in the rescue of Bach’s music from oblivion, as well as Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony, and as a conductor he gave historically informed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... biography. Volumes of verse (generally good). Novels (generally not good). A prose translation of Homer (durable). Lives of a Tory statesman and of Walter Scott’s biographer (solid). Revisionist histories of Scotland (unpopular in Scotland). He only dropped his pen to whack golf balls, flick fishing rods or browse the bookstalls by the Seine (Henry James ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... first stage in a tale concerned with travel to the world of the dead. The portrait of Achilles in Homer does not even mention his heel – which is a late accretion first registered under the Roman Empire. Undeterred, Ginzburg tells us that behind the hero depicted by Homer, and unknown to him, a prior god of the dead ...”

“... black lawyer Evander, father of one of Naipaul’s school friends, wrongly attributes his name to Homer instead of Virgil, his precocious young visitor sees through the pretence of the self-made man immediately. The bluff and affable manner of the failed writer Foster Morris cannot hide the evidence of an inner incompleteness – ‘the dimness of the ...”

“... poetry, ‘greatness’ is not the aim or the criterion. The aim is not to emulate Shakespeare or Homer or Dante or anybody else; for if and so far as one is a poet these criteria and ambitions are nonsense. Poetry is in this respect like science: the aim of the true poet is not to be a ‘great poet’, but to make a contribution to poetry: merely to say the ...”

“... bottom a deep religious melancholy, to divert the shocking thoughts of which he is now translating Homer. He has been woefully deranged – in a strait waistcoat – and now is sometimes so ill that they take away his shoebuckles, that he may have nothing within his reach with which he can hurt himself. It seems he apprehends himself to be in a state of ...”

“... taken it from all the World’. Such statements, frequently co-existing with fervid assertions of Homer’s greatness, were a common critical manoeuvre to dissociate the poetry of the epic from its morality. A comment in the Spectator stated that Achilles was ‘Morally Vicious, and only Poetically Good’. Neither Dryden, nor Pope after him, was deterred by ...”