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“... Classical and modern learning, literary debris (‘winedark’ and ‘slouching’ from Yeats, or Homer and Yeats if you’d rather), the Shakespearean puns on place-names, the opposition of French chic and US cool; the anxious, dreary and deluded male protagonists; the way the whole literal scene seems forever on the point of dissolving into wicked ...”

“... In the institutions of literary studies, it is often the authors about whom the least is known (Homer, Shakespeare) that are the most canonical. Was this what Mallarmé understood when he yearned for a text speaking on its own? Why is authority tied to the erasure of particularity? Why are some forms of particularity easier to erase than others? If these ...”

“... of the Bible, very much as they can be against comparable nit – picking in the study of Homer. Yet, says Josipovici, it is time for literary critics to go a step further. In the end, the Bible is not literature after all, if by ‘literature’ we mean texts marked by closure and well – rounded form. Its untidiness and open-endedness are ...”

“... in Algiers reminded him not of the Arabian Nights or similar Orientalist fantasies, but rather of Homer and accounts of women spinning wool or embroidering in a gynaeceum. Porterfield, however, unimpressed by what the painter actually says, suggests that Delacroix’s painting owed more to Orientalist cliché than it did to direct observation and that he ...”

“... literary) class came from country homes; towns were fought for; cities were bombed. From Homer to Owen the poetry of battle had obeyed the unity of place, been centred in a field of encounter. The language evolved by the Great War poets, with its dependence on the local and the particular, was not responsive to the concept of total war, the mobile ...”

“... I think it can be. In his preface to Fables Ancient and Modern, which contained versions of Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio and Chaucer, Dryden wrote: ‘Troilus and Cressida was also written by a Lombard author; but much amplified by our English Translatour, as well as beautified; the Genius of our Countrymen in general being rather to improve an ...”

“... journeys, the folios of the Society of Dilettanti and Wood’s essay on the original genius of Homer. During the Seventies, Sir William Hamilton, who had personally taken part in the excavations, did much to make the new discoveries known. After England’s isolation from the Continent was ended by Napoleon’s defeat, interest in the buried cities ...”

“... remedy.’ Little wonder his magnum opus was to be entitled ‘The Task’; no wonder translating Homer was so attractive. Pursuing ‘the jingling art’ for ‘amusement’, and in order to keep madness and self-destruction at bay, came readily to this Buckinghamshire Sheherazade. Lisping in numbers since his schooldays, he could now repay his ...”

“... writing another history of Alexander was to provide finally a text worthy of his achievement, as Homer had for Achilles: ‘I do not think I am unworthy of the first place in Greek language as Alexander was in arms.’ Alexander was something of an obsession. In one extraordinary dream Aristides imagines finding a double tomb with one half set aside for ...”

“... The journalist might have slaughtered him. It was to sound like a scholar that he said: ‘I read Homer as I read Racine.’ In the whole of Paris there are not even twenty people who are that fluent, and some of them do it for a living. But when you are dealing with people who have never studied the aforementioned Greek they will believe you. It reminds me ...”

“... teased by the Macedonian general Antigonus, who demanded what would have become of the Iliad if Homer had spent all his time boiling fish. The poet riposted that General Agamemnon would not have done so many great deeds if he had spent the day hanging about the camp kitchens watching poets cook conger eels. At least the ancient Greek military took fish ...”

“... is that poetry is the highest of the arts: Beethoven, Raphael, cannot reach The charm which Homer, Shakespeare, teach. The 19th century, Arnold concludes, does not afford time and space to be a poet. There will be no poets after Wordsworth, ‘the age can rear them no more.’ Hamilton stresses the dominance of Thomas Arnold, and points to the ...”

“... A triple cubit the beard of his cheek. When Polyphemus rails against Odysseus from the clifftop, Homer asks us to imagine him visible as well as audible from the sea as Odysseus and his men make their escape (Arnold Böcklin paints the raging, blinded Polyphemus hurling a massive piece of mountain at Odysseus’ boat). Giants in legends and folk tales are ...”

“... in the earlier chapters is a dry telling of the story of his temporary devotion to the theories of Homer Lane and ‘Loony’ Layard: Refusal to make use of one’s creative powers could lead to cancer. Stubbornness found physical expression as stiffness of the joints, the deaf and the blind were attempting to shut out the physical world, and Stephen Spender ...”

“... they govern is a great writer, and would have been a great writer without them, and so mocks, like Homer of the seven birthplaces, the confining clutch of circumstance, but I can’t. So, take them as they are. Yiyun Li was born in 1973 in Beijing. In 1996, she left for the US. She studied medicine at the University of Iowa, took her Master’s in ...”