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“... they now strike home with all the force of novelty. We are encouraged to take up the fragments of Sappho one by one, apprehend their shape, finger their texture, and hold them up to the light. Our ears are kept alert for subtle effects of sound and rhythm. And sometimes even our taste buds are engaged – ‘luscious’ and ‘delicious’ are favourite ...”

“... of your lines,’ Palmer wrote (she had studied classics at Bryn Mawr, and introduced Barney to Sappho). Barney had many other lovers; Souhami recounts that she once boasted of having eighteen different ‘assignations’ in one evening. Her first conquest in Paris was Liane de Pougy, a French courtesan whom she passed one afternoon while in a landau with ...”

“... and Ballads, whose tortured couples welcome snakebites. ‘Ah, ah, thy beauty!’ the jealous Sappho moans in ‘Anactoria’, ‘like a beast it bites,/Stings like an adder, like an arrow smites.’ Venus’ knightly lover in ‘Laus Veneris’, trapped in the certainty of his own damnation, thinks of her other conquests: Who, sleeping with her lips upon ...”

“... the lyric ‘I’ of the Romantics is alien to the Greeks; but that does not mean that when Sappho professes to faint at the sight and sound of another woman speaking sweetly and laughing delightfully, and Anacreon pleads with a boy of maidenish looks who spurns his advances, not knowing that he rides the poet’s soul like a horseman, they are merely ...”

“... We’ll Just Have to Do Something (heh heh) to Warm It Up. Won’t We? (Heh heh heh)Love-impaled Sappho, help me in my discombobulation! Did you hear that? HILLARY CLINTON IS FLIRTING WITH ME! She’s got my hand and she is warming it up! Bejeezus! (It’s getting positively toasty!) Not only that – my god! She’s giving me the Look! (What look?) The Look ...”

“... have been misspent and regretted. Souls are unreachable and unregarded: ‘living unloved’, her Sappho hopes only ‘to die unknown/Unwept, untended, and alone’. The dead sleep on, indifferent (‘I shall not see the shadows,/I shall not feel the rain,’ ‘Song’ promises). Being dead often seems little different to being alive. ‘When I was dead, my ...”

“... her affections and allegiances exceed this framework. Late in life she illustrated a volume of Sappho, and in general her work has very few masculine figures, but it wasn’t the product of a sealed ‘sapphic world’. Laurencin remained in dialogue with her male contemporaries. The Circus (1920) and Ballerinas at Rest (c.1941) suggest the saltimbanques ...”

“... And oh dear, if further demonstration were needed, this lumpish gobbet appears as a version of Sappho: The moon has set, The Seven Stars have set as well: It is the middle of the night, The time goes by, And by myself I lie. Untranslatable, for several reasons, agreed: but why print this? That hissing stumbling second line, seven words to ...”

“... every characteristic that the work will ultimately possess.’ (We might think of the fragments of Sappho, or the importance we place on the opening line of a novel.) Far from designating a hierarchical relation between the drawing and the finished composition, Delacroix suggests an equivalence.The cult of the incomplete has had its critics. In his Reith ...”

“... Improvisatrice came out in 1824, she was described in the press as the female Byron, the English Sappho and, after the notoriously independent eponymous heroine of Madame de Staël’s novel, the English Corinne. Her ecstatic and melancholic verse appeared to exhibit her own passions in an age when ladies were supposed to keep quiet about such things. It is ...”

“... Wilson insists on mythologising. It doesn’t matter much if Laura Riding is seen variously as Sappho leaping from her rock and Athena jumping out of Zeus’s temple: that is to say, one doesn’t really care. But you do mind when the Mandelstams are immersed in ancient Greek honey. First, Nadezhda is a modern Echo, though a redeemed version: ‘Ovid’s ...”

“... bound up with her time in the Reading Room; he had published a version of a recently rediscovered Sappho fragment that H.D. had transcribed for him in the museum. Aldington’s poetry, so closely linked to H.D.’s, was almost always inferior to hers: he has a tendency to state the obvious in a way that strives after intensity but can sound like ...”

“... well reviewed. Over the years, she made brilliant translations from the Greek, taking wing from Sappho, but also translating several choruses from Euripides as well as his play Ion. The poems after Sappho, and some of those in various personae (Pygmalion, Circe, Phaedra, Thetis, Eurydice), are dramatic monologues of ...”

“... homosexual males or of mature males who love other mature males, and little of homosexual females. Sappho, of course, lived on Lesbos, an island off the shore of Asia Minor, and although the Greeks must have had close connections with their oriental neighbours, social conditions there were not the same as those of Athens a century later. Indeed, such people ...”

“... The reason is the same in both cases: the existence of (to name only non-tendentious instances) Sappho, Murasaki, Jane Austen, George Eliot. With or without damaged egos, women have, and have for more than two and a half thousand years past, made great literary artists. Ms Greer’s unfair and inaccurate assertions may tempt many to suppose it all ...”