“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... culture starts, women’s voices are not being heard in the public sphere; more than that, as Homer has it, an integral part of growing up, as a man, is learning to take control of public utterance and to silence the female of the species. The actual words Telemachus uses are significant too. When he says ‘speech’ is ‘men’s business’, the word ...”

“... place of Orion and the hare in the sky is fixed, but the myth of the giant hunter is not stable. Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio and the 16th-century poet and mythographer Natalis Comes all wrote about Orion. He appears in the account of the skies written by Hyginus in the second century AD. Keats wrote of ‘blind Orion hungry for the morn’ in Endymion, while ...”

“... written in a long and distinguished career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject (‘Confessional poetry is poetry that reveals personal confidences, especially relating to mental illness ...”

“... often considered a popular, jobbing writer, were literate in Greek. Chapman, of course, translated Homer. Pollard’s case is sometimes circumstantial and often complicated by the possibility that what looks Greek has in fact been drawn from Latin. One of her claims, building on the work of others, is that Greek tragedy was often accessed through Greek/Latin ...”