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“... is already sounded by Dryden, who styles Jonson the Virgil of English drama to Shakespeare’s Homer, and adds tellingly: ‘I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.’ This perhaps articulates the basic problem. You cannot quite love Ben Jonson. In fact, sometimes you’re not sure if you even like him. There were plenty who didn’t at the time. There is a ...”

“... rebuttal in these dialogues. There is an exaltation of warfare, already implicit in Heraclitus and Homer, but more openly vehement than in any other modern thinker. There is the famous apologia for capital punishment, for the metaphysical dignitas of the executioner’s trade. Throughout, the keynote is that of ‘chastisement’, of history and social ...”

“... as children did in those far-off days. How does this square with the sophisticated reader of Homer and Racine, read in the original; with the lecturer to the St Anne’s Society on ‘Some Impediments to Christian Commitment’; with the acute reviewer of so many new novels, good and bad, over the years for so many periodicals? Literary editors didn’t ...”

“... what MacIntyre sees as three different traditions of Western ethical thought: one running from Homer to Aristotle and passing through Arab and Jewish writers to St Thomas Aquinas; another, Biblical, tradition that came to Aquinas from St Augustine; and a third that informed Scottish thought in the 17th and 18th centuries. The studies of these various ...”

“... the standard version of the poem (in Akkadian), perhaps around 1200 BC, considerably before Homer got to work on his better-known epics. But even after this, new variants came into the text, and there may never have been a canonical version of the poem in the sense that we would recognise. Nevertheless, most of the story of Gilgamesh can now be ...”

“... normally the order of the day. MacDiarmid as an impenitent Leninist will have none of that:   Homer, Plato, Plotinus, Catullus, Horace, and scores of others of whom ‘the ordinary people’ know nothing are nevertheless immortal.   ‘The ordinary people’ do learn a little about some of the great figures in literature during their school years, but ...”

“... things ‘dualise’ between being and not-being. Dualisers are popular in folklore. In Homer, the souls of the dead twitter like bats in a cave. Aesop’s fable of the bat and the weasel turns on the dualising nature of the bat. Bats’ hearts keep ants at bay. Bat’s blood will prevent girls’ breasts from prematurely swelling – and it will ...”

“... feasible. She saw the possibility first in great singers and actresses – women such as Louise Homer and Olive Fremstad. Her lifelong devotion to music is explained by O’Brien as an affection for art which has ‘a text without words ... nothing is named’ – like ‘intense friendships with other women which were never named’. The female voice she ...”

“... Through Layard he became acquainted with the revolutionary teachings of the American psychologist Homer Lane. Auden invited his friend Isherwood to join him in Berlin. Thirty-five years later, in his autobiography Christopher and his Kind, Isherwood wrote: ‘To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.’ But in the same book he also points out that Auden ‘had now ...”

“... juste milieu side of the spectrum: his heroes are Copley, Cole and Church; St Gaudens, Eakins and Homer; Frank Lloyd Wright and Edward Hopper. When it comes to abstract art, his likings tend to be predictable: nobody could be considered a maverick nowadays for admiring Jackson Pollock or David Smith, and Hughes’s heart clearly belongs to the least ...”

“... that her love fantasies follow a predictable pattern. Each chapter begins with some combination of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero or Augustine. As we might expect from a medieval historian, she then looks at texts from early Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David ...”

“... first episode of Ulysses is set. I resent that his ‘snot green’ – which is just a joke about Homer – has persisted as a description of the sea here. A mile up the road is the house in Glasthule where the real playwright J.M. Synge lived and the fictional Stephen Dedalus pissed against the hall door – unless, as he says, it was ...”

“... Paris in a house which only weeks later was sacked by the Prussians. At 12 he was in love with Homer. Already he was disturbed by the Victorian drift to doubt. Aged 21, still a Frenchman, he served a year in the French artillery. At Oxford he became president of the Union and was hailed ‘the Balliol Demosthenes’. All Souls’ refusal to grant him a ...”

“... to something more rarefied). So we arrive at the (for the conservative, woeful) position that Homer is no better than hip-hop. The culturally progressive proponent of the view that anything can be art may be delighted at the freedom this gives us and the seeming democratisation of the realm of culture, but the observation which follows on from there ...”

“... in order to make Sparta seem more opposed to the norms of Greek life. As for the mirror handles, Homer called Sparta the ‘land of beautiful women’, famous for their height and their healthy good looks; most famous of all was Helen, who was ‘of Sparta’ before she became ‘of Troy’. Aristotle wrote that female excellence was best expressed in ...”