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“... contemporary tribal societies. Gilmore gives us the well-aired rants against women from Hesiod and Homer, St Paul, Bernard of Cluny, Shakespeare and Swift to prove that his case goes beyond the merely anthropological. We hear, once again, Lear railing against ‘the sulphurous pit’, Milton moaning about ‘this fair defect of Nature’, Swift sniffing about ...”

“... margin, viz: Rubbish! Yes, indeed! How true, how true! I don’t agree at all. Why? Yes, but cf Homer, Od., iii, 151.’ Handwritten additions to printed books can indicate attention or carelessness, can embellish a work or deface it. In crass economic terms, writing in a book may decrease its value (Jackson had to rummage through library sale rejects to ...”

“... in the highly educated circles of the Greek elite under the Roman Empire. At the very top were Homer and the epic poets; and a little lower down, the historians Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, along with the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and (less congenial to modern taste) those bombastic orators Lysias and Demosthenes. What’s ...”

“... the vines, ravages like those of the boar that laid waste the environs of Calydon, as related by Homer in the first book of the Iliad, or those of the foxes sent by Themis to Thebes, which destroyed the fruits of the earth and the cattle’. The defence counsel, seldom able to plead alibi or mistaken identity, would invariably resort to ingeniously casuistic ...”

“... his own Spanish versions of the English texts, so in one sense there is only Borges here, no Homer and no English writer. And of course there is a great deal you can’t begin to touch by this method: rhythm, metre, idiom, peculiarities of individual languages. But in persuading us almost to forget the absence of English and Greek from his essay, Borges ...”

“... a feathered verse’, but Aristotle stands ‘firm as a castle on a hill’ for all that Horace, Homer and Virgil can do. In the end Logic tries to arrange a truce, but the effort fails dismally because her messenger, having fatally neglected the study of grammar, cannot speak plainly and never gets to the point. As the ‘authors and ...”

“... Strikes Back’, the harpist and hall forced to listen to a little demon music for a change. From Homer through Virgil and on, the descent to Hades has grown into a convention that has allowed poets to start a dialogue with the past, and with their poetic ancestry. It is also a trip that risks being merely a routine trot down the stairs for a chin-wag at the ...”

“... of literary magpie-ism. Mann’s story is itself highly allusive, incorporating translations of Homer and Wagnerian references which connect with Winterson’s use of Tristan and Isolde. The episode recalls the Venetian escapades in The Passion. It is also a tribute to a story that addresses the nature of art. Is this a pseud’s game, or is there more to ...”

“... sketched beaky hybrids like these: think of the Old Person of Cromer, perched on one leg reading Homer. Jackself exists in a twilight zone of nonsense verse and fairy tale; to ascribe him a fixed identity would dispel his charm. In Dahl’s tale, the boy becomes a swan, which is impossible, but only literally. Children’s books disappear into other worlds ...”

“... and Lydgate memorialised Chaucer, as well as the distant past, in his massive Troy Book. Knowing Homer only through epitomes, the West followed Virgil in tracing its origins from the losing side. All its peoples sprang from exiles, its new polities arising in the wake of historical catastrophe. At a time when London was unofficially styled New Troy, Lydgate ...”

“... to the ‘real’ Hippocrates (which recalls the joke that the Iliad was written either by Homer ‘or another poet of the same name’). The language and style, and some of the patterns of thought, resemble Herodotus, who wrote in the second half of the fifth century BCE. It’s a fair guess that the treatises date to that time, and therefore belong ...”

“... long been preoccupied by the idea of writing an epic in a woman’s voice. In an essay called ‘Homer’s Art’ (1990), she speculates that it might be possible for a woman to recover ‘some sense of what mind was like before Homer, before the world went haywire & women were denied participation in the design & making ...”

“... the uncomfortable suspicion that there is something wrong either with Schliemann’s Troy or with Homer’s, and that there is nothing much to be done about it.’ His coda: ‘Homer did not dig.’ The same is true of those who compiled the Mahabharata. They were recounting their ancient past, events almost as far removed ...”

“... was far from the first patron of the arts in the ancient world, or even in Rome. Homer describes bards singing for a place at court, and lyric poets wrote songs for autocrats all over the Greek world. The poet Ennius (b.239 bce) benefited from the support of Roman statesmen and generals. His Annales, the great epic of Rome before Virgil’s ...”

“... is a chained-up bear: half-size, scraggly and dull in the eyes, kept alive on dog food. Homer Campbell, who runs the general store upriver and sells limp carrots to the locals, tells Lou there has always been one on the estate. As keeper of the house, as investigator of its long line of owners, it will also be her duty to care for this ...”