“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... when he wrote Alastor. Keats thought of Herschel when he wrote his sonnet on Chapman’s Homer and registered in his swimming planet the way convection currents in the sky ‘give objects the appearance of being seen through a rippling water surface’. Coleridge may have been thinking in his ‘One Life’ texts (with their vision of cosmic ...”

“... Renaissance humanist Marc-Antoine Muret – and composed his own epoch-making Prolegomena to Homer in Latin, a decision that enabled his work to reach a far wider public than it would have in German. Though Leonhardt is clearly right to emphasise that formal Latin education remained classical in the early modern period, he underestimates the period’s ...”

“... up with, though to the modern mind they appear fanciful and unscientific, were naturalistic. Where Homer and Hesiod had accounted for phenomena such as earthquakes or lightning storms in terms of divine intervention, by the sixth century BC Thales could claim that the earth floated on water, and that earthquakes were caused by wave-tremors. What’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... translation. Having received a copy of Barrett Wendell’s Traditions of European Literature from Homer to Dante (1920) – a work based on Wendell’s comparative literature course at Harvard – she characteristically reports to Berenson that the first thing she did was glance at the bibliography (‘they tell so much in such books!’), and was ...”

“... belong naturally to the situation. Thompson reports the case in 1823 of an ex-soldier called John Homer, who had maltreated his wife and forced her against net will to be bought out by her own brother. He then thought this entitled him to marry again, and was transported for bigamy. Life’s little ironies also produced a wife-purchaser called Thomas Hardy in ...”

“... of Greek and Latin literature. The highest standards are set not by the English poets but by Homer, Virgil and Dante. If anything deserves to be part of the school curriculum merely because of its contribution to our cultural heritage it is Latin, which until recently was a requirement for university entrance. The intellectual shallowness 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Ancient Greece: by giving the Greeks their gods and establishing their theodicy in poetry, Homer was both Moses and Milton. Like Herder, Hegel was trying to temper German nostalgia for Greece. Hölderlin, however, held nothing back. Throughout his life, he wanted to see the German polis renovated along democratic Greek lines – a dream gradually ...”

“... to face. You might describe our whole classical heritage that way: ghosts of Solon in our laws, of Homer in our wars. You might also use the same description for death, that other great emptiness, which we can neither understand wholly, nor wholly ignore. In Nox, as in If Not, Winter, emptiness and apparatus surround short classical texts and explore their ...”

“... between young whites. Swearing is an action, and one that can hurt, harm, engage and enrage, as Homer and Aristophanes and Chaucer and Shaw knew. When a swear word is used casually as an intensifier it can carry a residuum of the pain and shock that it is capable of inflicting in other circumstances. That transfer of shock is part of what we do when we ...”