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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... because they don’t appear in the earliest layers of Indian and Greek literature (the Vedas and Homer). But West insists that they ‘must be historically connected’ because they correspond point for point and are not attested for any other people. In fact, a number of the features of this theory are attested in other cultures, and it isn’t true that ...”

“... his characters know: spears are ‘laid like the oars of a longship’. In becoming the northern Homer, Morris sought to show the way art could embody collective experience. Although his characters are the pawns of Odin, they sustain themselves in singing of how their exploits make history. For the dwarf Regin, who leads Sigurd to Fafnir, to be human is to ...”

“... care for the sufferer. He writes of the anthropologist John Layard, who had been psychoanalysed by Homer Lane in an attempt to overcome a nervous breakdown so severe that it at first caused physical paralysis: ‘annoyed by Auden’s refusal to love him and by Lane’s dying half-way through his analysis, Layard shot himself in the mouth.’ Something seems ...”

“... like David Dabyeen’s Coolie Odyssey* will go back to The Tempest, Blake and, most evidently, Homer in an effort to come to terms with colonialism. And Derek Walcott has for some years now read ‘Iliads and Odysseys’ (Chatwin’s phrase), Clampitt’s ‘middle of the earth ... stepmotherland’, into his chorography of islands: That sail which leans ...”

“... to the Golden Mean. The result is a comic sermon of extraordinary power. Rabelais could read Homer, Plutarch, Ovid, Genesis, the Psalms or the Gospels through the eyes of Lucian and then spin round on his toe and present them to us in a more straightforward way. But not even Lucian shared Rabelais’s keen awareness of the comedy inherent in the human ...”