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“... No one was ever moved to tears by reading about the unhappy fates of heroes and heroines in Homer, Sophocles, Molière, Racine, Sydney [sic], Spenser, or Shakespeare. Yet even the impeccable Lord Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, confessed to having cried – blubbered, boohooed, snuffled and sighed – over the death of Little Nell in The Old ...”

“... with ‘our desolate concrete plain’. The gist seems to be that the poet will never be Dante or Homer, only a philosopher of captions. This is clear despite the bodged dovetailing of ship and concrete plain. The final line of the poem (‘That pain is the one immortal gift of our stewardship’) relates to this presumably by the menial role of steward in ...”

“... Most of its members had most probably never heard of him. When Vico’s theories about Homer came to the notice of the Homeric scholar F.A. Wolf, and Vico’s writings on early Rome to that of the great Roman historian Niebuhr, these eminent men were not pleased. Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt. At least Vico, whatever his other anxieties, had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as often as he compliments them. When he arrives in Limbo, its five canonical poets – Virgil, Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan – welcome him as the sixth and implicitly greatest of their band, since he alone will be saved. The artist Oderisi, moralising about the transience of fame, notes that ‘one Guido [Cavalcanti] has taken from the other ...”

“... the effect of almost any orthodoxy is to hide this, and pretend that everybody ought to be like Homer or Dr Leavis.’ One of the most effective ways of creating an orthodoxy, as Leavis at least seems to have known, is to identify an enemy: the pretence that everybody should be like X always involves the assumption that they must hate Y, be as unlike Y as ...”

“... instinctively by Plato, this greatest enemy of art that Europe has yet produced. Plato contra Homer: that is the complete, the genuine antagonism – there the ‘otherworldly one’ with the best of wills, the great slanderer of life; here its involuntary deifier, golden nature. I need hardly remind anyone what kind of future is being prepared, in ...”

“... great foremothers (inspired, perhaps, by the cadences of Brittain’s prose: ‘From the days of Homer the friendships of men have enjoyed glory and acclamation, but the friendships of women have ... been unsung’); and that triumphant reissue in the 1980s of all Holtby’s works as Virago Modern Classics. And now this biography, sharp, sensitive and ...”

“... novelist. If poverty were to force him to sell his books, he still would keep just a few: Moses, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles – and Richardson. The intensity of this admiration was surely rooted in Diderot’s recognition in Richardson’s fiction of what he himself could not manage: the density of scruples, the faith in psychological complexity, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”