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“... 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 ...”

“... the picture of health, his hands all scratches and with a cut or bruise on every knuckle, Horace, Homer and Virgil ever present to his mind, forthright and independent in his opinions, makes a thousand mistakes but corrects them himself ... It so happens that this thumbnail portrait fits Andrew’s younger brother, John Matthew, who was educated at ...”

“... the feudal Catholic Europe of the dethroned monarchs. So did the device of making a hero of blind Homer and blind Tiresias, as Byron and Shelley would make heroes of Tasso, Dante and England’s blind prophet Milton. Writers are problematic heroes for revolutionary activists, to be sure, since they still carry the smack of self-indulgence and self-creating ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Poussin’: Orion, the subject of this landscape, was the classical Nimrod; and is called by Homer ‘a hunter of shadows, himself a shade’. He was the son of Neptune; and having lost an eye in some affray between the gods and men, was told that if he would go to meet the rising sun, he would recover his sight. He is represented setting out on his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Pseudodoxia most of his facts come from his reading. Urne-Buriall draws on dozens of sources, from Homer and Herodotus to Cardano and John Stow, which Browne meticulously references in more than a hundred notes. He paid no mind to the divisions of knowledge of our more specialised age. Examining the urns and their human ashes leads him to consider how past ...”

“... intimate and transformative.* He could animate the bare bones of a biblical text with flesh from Homer or Lucretius. But he could also cite Eusebius and Solinus and Ortelius and Grotius and Bucer and Paraeus, and moreover Leunclavius and Wesenbechius, and many other non-household names too, as though they were his bedtime reading – which they probably ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... own deluded efforts. In a way Hegel was telling an old-fashioned journey-story in the tradition of Homer, Virgil, Malory or Bunyan. But it was specifically a philosophical tale: its hero was not an individual, but consciousness in general, and the journey it described was one that all of us must make if we are ever to learn the truth about ourselves and the ...”

“... toxic tort suit against ‘Big Sugar’ but ‘Marge’s Law’ is soon subverted. When Homer himself becomes a sugar bootlegger, Marge realises she can’t win against the dark forces of carb-addiction and gives up. The metabolic science that is said to underpin the addiction story, and that justifies Atkins’s regime, is by now reasonably ...”

“... memorials try to include everyone, victims and perpetrators, from all sides of the conflict. Homer honours the dead on both sides in the Trojan War and he gives us more than two hundred names – Alice Oswald opens her fine ‘excavation’ of the Iliad, which is explicitly called Memorial, by listing them. But this list, horribly long as it is, does not ...”