“... Tai’. Cusk has glimpsed the central truth of modern life: that sometimes it is as sublime as Homer, a sail full of wind with the sun overhead, and sometimes it is like an Ikea where all the couples are fighting. ‘I wonder what became of the human instinct for beauty,’ she writes in The Last Supper, ‘why it vanished so abruptly and so utterly, why ...”

“... who was to give public lectures, tutor private pupils in Greek and produce a Latin translation of Homer. But he lasted for only two academic years, unable to adapt to Italian ways, and died from a lightning strike during a storm at sea. He did, however, complete the translation, which he left in Boccaccio’s hands. The triumphant Boccaccio boasted that he ...”

“... tales. It also helps if one remembers that Thucydides is the follower and rival of Herodotus and Homer, not just a political commentator on his own times. What will remain is a man of whose life and opinions we know little, and a writer who examines the horrors of war, the tangle of human motives, the glory and degradation of his own ...”

“... 36. And on the single page, 907, given to a Greek Index, comprising about 1,200 words, among the HOMER, ANON, SAPP, SOPH, EURI, NICI, AESC, PIND, ARIS, PERI (the Funeral Oration given to PERI, not THUC), ascriptions are four to POUND. Final detail, the earlier editions had those rather sombre blue-grey typographical dust-wrappers, didn’t they? The new ...”

“... admired two above the others, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ – which describes what the encounter with greatness in a literary work is like. Keats’s Greek was not up to the difficulties of Homer but the mist lifted when he looked into Chapman’s strong English telling of ...”

“... On 26 April 1941, the day before the German army raised the swastika over the Acropolis, Homer Davis, president of Athens College, was entrusted by the Greek War Relief Association with changing two million dollars into drachmas – money raised by his fellow Greek-Americans. Warned that the money would be delivered in small denominations, he was accompanied to the Bank of Greece by three helpers bearing a steamer trunk and two large suitcases, only to discover that the bank’s supply of currency had been taken by the government when it evacuated to Crete three days earlier ...”

“... lakes. Indigenous North American accounts told of hummingbirds hitchhiking on the backs of geese; Homer suggested that every spring cranes went to war against ‘the pygmy-men’ at the ends of the earth – revenge, he said, for Hera’s mistreatment of their queen. In 1694 the scientist Charles Morton suggested in deadly earnest that the stork, along with ...”

“... penny whistle’. One particularly notorious example described the Hyrcanian wasp in the style of Homer – ‘it descends upon the mountain lands and flits inside the hollow oaks’ – ‘“descends upon”! . . . it’s as if he is talking about some wild buffalo or the Erymanthian boar, not a bee.’ Hegesias of Magnesia, however, outblew even ...”

“... A fool, so just a copy of a wit. When Dulness inflates her phantom, she is doing what Pope did to Homer, and when the notorious bookseller Curll wins the race and tries to seize the phantom, it vanishes like the ‘baseless fabrick’ of Prospero’s masque, the most resonant English image of creative magic: And now the victor stretch’d his eager hand ...”

“... Fishkin’s clearly tendentious title? Mark Twain, Clifton Fadiman wrote, is ‘our Chaucer, our Homer, our Dante, our Virgil, because Huckleberry Finn is the nearest thing we have to a national epic. Just as the Declaration of Independence ... contains in embryo our whole future history as a nation, so the language of Huckleberry Finn (another Declaration ...”

“... Fallacy Fallacy’. The long opening piece argues for a strong affinity between Shakespeare and Homer and Euripides, supposedly via Virgil. The title essay is a discourse on ancient Stoicism in its relation to two later types of the philosophy, one that eschews emotion altogether and another that seeks it out in order to repress it. This ...”

“... syntactic) of passages selected from texts in some nine different languages, ranging from Homer and the Old Testament to Virginia Woolf, it assumes throughout that reality has an objective existence, is open to perception, and needs no apologetic inverted commas. It can be and enduringly is represented by writers whose work bears the impress not only ...”

“... his didactic heritage. But by the same token it is hard to resist some qualms at the inclusion of Homer. The omission as yet of Aristotle and Plato (as indeed of Mahomet) is no doubt purely temporary. But, on any reading of the concept of authority, it is a little surprising to find Godwin and Herzen figuring in the initial list of Masters. Here perhaps the ...”

“... What did the average citizen feel about Greek Love? What, to begin with, would he learn from Homer, whose works everyone knew, and who was constantly cited, like Holy Writ, for moral guidelines? Not very much. While exploring relationships between men and women with great psychological finesse – Menelaus and Helen, Hector and Andromache, Odysseus and ...”

“... Ossian, a blind Celtic bard of the third century AD, who was soon noisily proclaimed the Scottish Homer. The works of Ossian caused a literary sensation across Europe, but soon sceptical voices were raised not only in England and Ireland, but even among Ossian’s former champions in Scotland. The part played by the philosopher David Hume eerily anticipates ...”