“... 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 ...”

“... meteorology and communication, supersonic flights and high-altitude aviation. US Brigadier General Homer Boushey (a name ripped from Dr Strangelove) gave a speech to the Washington Aero Club in 1958 about the merits of establishing ‘a retaliation base of unequalled advantage’ on the Moon, from where missiles, hidden on the dark side, would zero in on the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... morality are not Poetry but Philosophy.’ Or, as he expresses it in his engraved manifesto ‘On Homer’s Poetry’: ‘Unity and Morality are secondary considerations [in art] & belong to Philosophy & not to Poetry.’ Blake thought the Bible the greatest literary work of the ‘Western tradition’, but he did not therefore see it as work which was free ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Aeneid into an argument for Papal dominance in the Church, and draw on the martial heroism of Homer to add muscle to that idea of unity. Only in theory. From the earliest stages of the extremely extended composition of the poem, there were fault-lines within it, which widened into cracks and gulfs as the project developed. Tasso probably began the first ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to historic rights over Kosovo, and even to current political alliances’. If the poems of Homer, the core documents of Western European culture, are shown to have a direct link to the oral epics of contemporary Albania, the status of Albania in the West is likely to be radically altered. The smiling monk points out that the two ‘are doing the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... readers of Ulysses do not believe in omens, but Joyce eagerly did; in this he is genuinely like Homer. Four of the characters receive omens, and Joyce would regard these as an assurance that some great event would occur. Stephen on the previous night had a disturbing dream which he increasingly recalls; and the absurd Haines, who was also sleeping in the ...”

“... go all the way back to the primeval smithy’s harnessing of fire. Henderson felt alternately like Homer wandering through the ruins of Troy, and ‘as if I had stumbled into a Mau-Mau camp and been recognised as the brother of Jomo Kenyatta’. In July 1953, he made an even more arresting discovery. Following a tip picked up in Aberdeen’s Castlegate ...”