“... 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 ...”

“... him. Who was he, this jumped-up dispenser of powders, to proclaim his astonished delight at Homer, read not even in the original, but in Elizabethan (George Chapman’s) translation? Who was he to write so very often, and as if he had a natural right to do so, of mythological figures he had read about in books intended for schoolboys, Tooke’s Pantheon ...”

“... pointed nonchalantly to a faraway corner in the outfield stands, and with his first swing, hit a homer to exactly that spot. Stein was always pointing and hitting and (if you take her word for it) basking complacently in the inevitable applause.This close-to-hallucinatory sense of self-importance no doubt helps to explain the potentially reckless decision to ...”