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“... he is, as Hazlitt pointed out, ‘a writer of centos, and yet in originality scarcely inferior to Homer’. This patchwork quilt effect or, to use a favourite image of Hazlitt’s, this melting of scrap metal into statues, can be seen if we consider the repeated images of ugly, dissonant noise in Milton. In an account of the building of the Tower of Babel in ...”

“... in hyperspace. The work of the imagination in metaphorical genealogies is obvious. In Hesiod and Homer, for instance, the gods of earth and sky produce the Titans, Cronus and his sister, Rhea, who gives birth to Zeus and other Olympian gods. Achilles is a great-grandson of Zeus through his grandfather Aeacus; through his mother, Thetis, he is a grandson of ...”

“... like the Poetic Heads Blake produced for his patron William Hayley’s Turret House in Felpham: Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare and the boys. Trophies in whose glow the Sussex poetaster could bask, quietly absorbing their power.) But how much more interesting it would be, I thought, to discover in some south coast junkshop an engraved and ...”

“... standards closer to plain than to pretty and had a gait, somebody once remarked, like the oxen in Homer, she nonetheless radiated erotic significance. People felt it in her, just as she felt it in them: there was something here that mattered, though what it was remained impossible to convey in words. (Pictures are something else. The photographs Conradi ...”

“... means ‘long’). But though there were omissions, there were no silly inclusions; Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry James; and near the end was one poem that certainly might, in its intensity, be described as ‘short’ – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This almost ...”

“... and back with a couple of pints from the Powerscourt Arms under my Montparnasse belt through the Homer dusk. Often very moving and it helps to swamp the usual palpitations. But I disagree with you about the gardenish landscape. The lowest mountains here terrify me far more than anything I saw in Connemara or Achill. This habit of walking would fill one of ...”

“... editor points out, is ‘more reminiscent of Hamlet (an alter ego whom he frequently quotes) than Homer’. Their carefulness may be the result of censorship, as he makes clear in a letter from California in 1944: ‘I trust I am not guilty of a breach of military reticence if I suggest that, were this ban to be lifted, I could report nothing that would give ...”

“... punctuated with poetry illustrating various of its themes (beginning and ending with the verses by Homer and W.H. Auden that give the book its title). The section entitled ‘The Historic Consequences of the Long War’ starts with Philip Larkin’s Imperial lament, ‘Homage to a Government’, whose last line is a kind of inversion of the much better known ...”

“... but the Yankees eventually tied it up, took it to extra innings, and then won it with a lead-off homer in the bottom of the 11th, smacked into the crowd by some guy they had recently acquired from Cincinatti called Aaron Boone. Afterwards, Boone told the press that Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ shortstop, a nice, inoffensive boy with cheekbones, the David ...”

“... doing the most to empower Hoover.The Roosevelt administration, particularly the attorney general, Homer Cummings, fretted about gangster movies: The Public Enemy (1931), Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932) all seemed to be backing the wrong side. The Supreme Court wouldn’t offer filmmakers first-amendment protection until 1952; Hollywood producers ...”

“... with Lucy when they plan to look through a book of Flemish prints and Flaxman’s illustrations of Homer – yet further references to copies and reflections – he emphatically rules out in his mind any inspection of Flaxman’s Dante. He has a fearful premonition that he would find there too close an approximation of the face of the mysterious girl that has ...”

“... as he talks; normally he’d smoke through his lunch hour. He’s wearing long jean shorts and a Homer Simpson T-shirt; his eyes are ringed with yellow-blue shadows. ‘To be honest, this place takes so much out of me,’ he says. ‘It’s hard to pull away when I get home. I certainly swear at home more because I’m allowed to, but other than that ...”

“... to be intimately familiar – for a start – with Keats and Shelley and Donne and Milton and Homer and Anacreon and Alciphron and Herodotus and Thucydides and Horace and Shakespeare and Wanley and Quarles and the Illustrated London News and Johnson’s Dictionary and the fifty-odd – very odd – volumes of the Biographie Universelle.’ This is ...”

“... when you consider the integrity of many pagan texts. The texts of Aristophanes or Sappho or even Homer seem to have been considered far more sacred by the Greeks than ‘God’s word’ was by the Judahites and Christians. The difference, of course, is that one is playful art and the other is potent prophecy, and far too important, therefore, not to be ...”

“... to learn: Rabelais and Conrad, books on bees and ants by Jean-Henri Fabre – the ‘insect’s Homer’ – great 19th-century volumes on microscopic creatures, on wild animals, the African bush, spiritualism, anthropology and much more. It was the source of a lifetime’s engagement with both literature and the natural world in all its diversity. Levi ...”