“... to the Wheatleys, Phillis began writing out of ‘curiosity’ and acquired small Latin. She knew Homer in Pope’s translations, and her poetry indicates some learning in geography and history. She continued writing in her ‘leisure Moments’ without any intention of publishing, or so the preface to her book later claimed. She was ...”

“... epic verbal landmarking, in the same way that prepared phrases keep on coming back in Virgil and Homer. Sandy had ‘a bit of strife parking the vehicle’ on his first record, Wild Life in Suburbia, back in 1959. He has had a bit of strife parking the vehicle ever since, often several times in the same monologue, when the announcement that there was a bit ...”

“... with a great many more to come. So far, Shaw is absent from a list which includes Dickens, Homer, Dante, Rousseau, Goethe, Woolf, Constant, Balzac, Mann and Tolstoy: so it is as well that he is being taken care of ...”

“... of her? Lauded throughout classical antiquity as the ‘Tenth Muse’ and greatest poet next to Homer, Sappho is believed to have lived on the Greek island of Lesbos some time around 600 BC. Plato and Aristophanes mention her; in ancient Rome, Horace and Catullus wrote famous imitations of her verses. Some six hundred years after her death, her renown was ...”

“... to see the beauty of palm trees: a prolonged meditation on the tree as it appears in the world, in Homer and in the paintings of Matisse. But Scarry stretches language too far when she says that her earlier indifference to the palm tree was an error. To make an error I must be unable to acknowledge something of which I should have been aware. But what of ...”

“... in the front rank was beautiful, to be commemorated as such; but Greek art and literature from Homer onwards never stopped reflecting on the reality – the physical price – of glory. The Met kouros is mighty and vulnerable. Maybe this, most deeply, is what prolongs the nervous laughter in the gallery. The young man’s ‘equipment’ is fabulous. But ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at p. 37, ll. 407ff.; Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ at p. 58, ll. 26ff.; Homer, Pliny and Boileau (and Addison and Johnson) on pygmies and cranes at p. 181, ll. 266ff. (also p. 328, ll. 159ff.); Boileau’s ‘De Paris au Pérou, du Japon jusqu’à Rome’ (also a source of Johnson’s ‘China to Peru’) at p. 340; the menstrual ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”