“... contemplate. Yet it is striking that there is one area where the film-makers made the character of Homer Parrish less functional than the actor who played him. Russell could put on his prostheses by himself, and wasn’t helpless without them. Could anything signal more clearly the reassuring fact – in this context – of impotence? The character’s ...”

“... version of the Parallel Lives, and is likely to have kept up with the publication of Chapman’s Homer. Successive chapters of Burrow’s book explore Shakespeare’s engagement with Ovid, Virgil, Plautus and Terence, Seneca and Plutarch, as well as his not inconsiderable acquaintance with the major works of Cicero, Horace, Juvenal and Lucan, among ...”

“... you expect when they rain bricks down on me all day.’ 5 June. Finish Adam Nicolson’s book on Homer, The Mighty Dead, which is occasionally over-rich but very enjoyable. It ends as the Odyssey ends with Odysseus’ return to Ithaca and the slaughter of Penelope’s suitors and the hanging of her maids, scenes of such horror they alienate whatever sympathy ...”

“... Mimesis, an extraordinary account of the history of ‘representation’ in the West from Homer to Proust. Our favourite class was a joint seminar on the fiction of Indonesia’s great writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who was then still in one of Suharto’s gulags. Careful, close reading of fiction with a group of excellent students was quite new to ...”

“... Collected Poems had none), and is attentive to Smith’s range of allusion – Homer, Pindar, Seneca, Catullus, Wither, Young, Blake, Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Eliot and many more. May’s interest in Smith’s performances makes you want to return to her recordings, gets you to think about the kind of life her voice ...”

“... of Myrt Clare’s mother, Mrs Truitt? Is it Sadie? (Myrt Clare was the postmistress.) And when did Homer Clare die?’ Soon afterwards, he needed to know the name of the secretary in the sheriff’s office. On 26 March 1961 he wrote again: ‘In Reno, when the policeman spotted the car, and recognised the licence number, how did he know it was the car?’ On ...”

“... Catholic (The Hind and the Panther). Historical chronicle (Annus Mirabilis). Translation: from Homer, Juvenal, Persius, Ovid, Boccaccio, Chaucer and others; and of the complete works of Virgil. And then there are the massed and (except All for Love) rather mediocre plays which took up most of his time and earned much of his money: heroic tragedies (The ...”

“... Books, articles, whole careers have been devoted to studying particular cases: Virgil imitating Homer, or Renaissance humanists imitating Cicero, or English Romantics imitating Milton, or modern novelists trying not to imitate Joyce. A historian of imitation has to survey this vast body of scholarship without becoming overwhelmed.This is the challenge Colin ...”

“... that perception, thereby creates a basis for community.’ That’s not quite how it works in ‘Homer’s Phobia’, from Season Eight of The Simpsons, first broadcast in 1997. John Waters provides the voice of a dealer in ‘collectibles’ who admires the family’s style, assuming it’s knowingly camp. Even Homer’s ...”

“... in his favour. He also gets credit for his own appearance on the programme, in the episode where Homer and his buddies go to the Super Bowl. ‘I’m billionaire tyrant Rupert Murdoch,’ said billionaire tyrant Rupert Murdoch. Opinions differ as to the most egregious headline ever published by one of Murdoch’s papers. ‘GOTCHA!’, published on the first ...”

“... it has warmth. The warmth is audible in another Dedication, that to the Examen Poeticum: ‘Homer forms and equips those ungodly man-killers, whom we poets, when we flatter them, call heroes: a race of men who can never enjoy quiet in themselves, ‘till they have taken it from all the world.’ His own heroes, Almanzor and Aureng-Zebe, are in this line ...”

“... was a Greek or a Jew, had been killed by a bomb in Shanghai in 1937, even that his given name was Homer – are hearsay, most of them floated by Gladys one day, taken back the next. ‘I really don’t know who he was,’ Stone told a researcher in the late 1970s. He added that his mother didn’t seem much interested in men. Stone half-believed that his own ...”

“... nearly blind figure briefly in motion, described him ‘wandering like King Lear’ and as a ‘Homer with vacant eyes’. At the 2011 show Degas and the Ballet at the Royal Academy, it was played on a loop in a side gallery, towards the end of the exhibition. I watched it about twenty times. He walks towards us, and seems to look at us; he walks towards ...”

“... shelves is the gay male epic. The word ‘epic’ casts a wide net, but, in the absence of a Homer or Milton or Proust, the primary claim to epic-dom (read: ‘epic dumb’) seems to be not depth of thought but depth of book, measured not in pages but inches. This is territory originally carved out – well, not carved exactly, more like landscaped ...”

“... mastery as it appears in the great creations of naming, recording and enjoying, in the worlds of Homer, Shakespeare, Milton or Dante. Kafka must find mastery in minuteness, in disappearance. Kafka’s sovereign perspective on psychoanalysis ought to have helped critics to detach from its constricting domain his own person at least. His struggle with his ...”