“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... should be a law obliging publishers to furnish all new books with ‘say, a page of Sophocles or Homer in the original with appropriate marginalia bound into the binding’; it would be a gift to posterity, a second chance for people put off ancient languages at school, something to stow in your carry-on in case you crash on a desert island and find yourself ...”

“... City, involves three variously damaged ex-servicemen who have become friends on the flight home. Homer (Harold Russell) plays piano in the near foreground, while Al (Fredric March) looks on, and Fred (Dana Andrews) makes a call he would rather not make from a booth in the distant background. Wyler filmed the scene in long shot, with both planes of action in ...”

“... of them. Soon after this meeting, he’s introduced to the great poets of the classical world – Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan – who do him the extraordinary honour of inviting him to join their ‘noble school’ so that he becomes ‘the sixth among those high intelligences’, the fifth being Virgil, the poet’s guide through the ...”

“... that poets are bending over backwards to please their princes. George Chapman dedicating his Homer to ‘Henry Prince of Wales’ anagrammatised his patron’s name into ‘OVR SVNN, HEYR, PEACE, LIFE’ by splitting the W of Wales into two constitutive Vs and then deeming them able to serve as Us, which again was doable then. This is done Very Visibly ...”

“... his mouth opening and closing like a fish caught in a net.’There are echoes in this killing of Homer and Aeschylus. And Marriott’s note tells us that his title is taken from Simone Weil’s ‘The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force’, an essay that works out why, in Baldwin’s phrase, whatever goes up must come down. For Weil, ‘those who have force on loan ...”

“... the 18th century, critics were given to insisting that old books – the Bible, for example, and Homer – could be read with understanding only by those who considered the social conditions at the time of origin, and knew the individual early textual histories. Belated Enlightenment thinkers like Shelley and Marx soldiered on in this historical vein, which ...”