“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... more precise. Allegiances too, are more discreetly signalled: to Dante, Villon, Chapman’s Homer, among others; to the King James Bible and, in ‘The Spoils’, his last big poem before ‘Briggflatts’, to an array of Arabic, Jewish and Persian materials – Bunting served in Persia during the war and later became the Times correspondent in ...”

“... Samuel Richardson (‘O Richardson, Richardson ... I will keep you on the same shelf with Moses, Homer, Euripides and Sophocles’) caused French hearts to beat even faster. A steady supply of political pilgrims made their way across the Channel to observe the miracle of English government in action, while a fast-spending set around the younger princes of ...”

“... tribe’) in a merry, if mucky, competition. Parodying the heroic games in Homer and Virgil, booksellers first race to possess a tame poet created for them by the Goddess of Dulness (‘All as a partridge plump, full-fed, and fair,/She form’d this image of well-body’d air;/With pert flat eyes she window’d well its head;/A brain of ...”

“... fallen into the clutches of some latter-day equivalent of F.W. Newman, editor and translator of Homer, whom Arnold memorably pilloried for his obstructive pedantry and lack of literary tact. Jane, Arnold’s elder sister who partly functioned as a kind of epistolary superego for him, worried, with her moralising Lake District austerity, whether Matt ...”