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“... by the personification of black complicity in white supremacy, a chilling free black boy called Homer – sends her scrambling back on the lam. However formulaic it may be, the plot is propulsive, and the book is full of vivid images, learned allusions and astute observations, like this one about a white medical student-cum-bodysnatcher in New England: The ...”

“... is true as far as it goes but too general to be revealing. The same could be said after all of Homer and Iris Murdoch. Dora tells us that Woolf’s childhood holidays in Cornwall, which inspired the setting of To the Lighthouse, belonged to an age of ‘elite seaside tourism’ that came to an end only in the 20th century with ‘the emergence of ...”

“... and excesses even as they profited from it. Pope’s fantastically lucrative translation of Homer is only the most obvious example.What did ordinary readers make of it all? Reading It Wrong considers the pervasive 18th-century habit of disguising names in passages of lampoon, either to impede prosecution for seditious libel or scandalum magnatum ...”

“... Kenner says that Stephen is merely ‘trying out phrases, outdoing Yeats’, or perhaps imitating Homer (Starchamber Quiry, p. 26): but Kenner is the one who has no eyes here. Joyce often expresses fascination at the incessant slight movements of water around the tidal estuary of the Liffey: consider the reappearances of the throwaway pamphlet in the ...”

“... competitive spirit, for instance, a running motif, is illustrated with examples which extend from Homer, Pindar, Plato and Thucydides to an altar at Olympia to appease a malevolent hero who causes chariots to crash, and a carpet-maker who weaves a boastful piece of self-aggrandisement into the textile itself. The cult of youth is illustrated by both a ...”

“... of an ordinary day in Dublin, but also replicates a structure of meaning found originally in Homer’s epic. This replication can be said to fulfil a ‘figure’ found in Homer, just as the New Testament replicates and thereby ‘fulfils’ the Old Testament by referring the events of Jesus’s life to the ...”

“... opening of a new world to him, and I believe he felt as Keats felt when he first read Chapman’s Homer.’ The only wild surmise which visited Joplin, who remained in America, required him to avert his gaze from the New World he already inhabited, and to look back across the Atlantic. Wasn’t Europe where the ‘spring of art’ itself was to be found? Most ...”

“... literary critics interested in the ‘heroic societies’ or ‘honour cultures’ described in Homer and the Greek tragedies, or in the medieval Icelandic sagas that Miller, a professor of law, has made an object of special study. Humiliation is harder, and has received much less attention. Miller’s discussion of it seems much more curious and disputable ...”

“... The spread is enormous; the treatment is necessarily selective: for example, ten pages on Homer, six on Hesiod, nine on Plato, 12 on Virgil, 20 on Enoch, 17 on St Paul, two and a half on the Gospel of John. Bernstein’s task is easier, and he does understandably better, when his author has a coherent and argued view. But his prose accounts of heroic ...”

“... to scratch your head too hard to come up with the New Yorker. A distinguished musician, called Homer in the novel, says exactly what White, in his Introduction to a 1994 reprint of A Boy’s Own Story, says Virgil Thomson said to him. A well-known poet, who figures largely in The Farewell Symphony, makes a Spoonerist joke on the subject of a Japanese ...”

“... than a crony of Athenian aristocrats who were apt to see themselves as the heirs of the heroes of Homer, and resented being governed by the common man. Stone has no time for pedigrees, and less for the Greeks of the Heroic Age; Achilles was a ‘cry-baby’, and Odysseus a schemer and a trickster, as well as a part-time pirate. The motives of those who ...”

“... adorns his scientific observation. His evocation of a narwhal’s ‘sea-washed back’ echoes Homer, a reminder of the ‘sea-shouldering whales’ that Keats so admired. The first-hand observations and densely packed detail ground Lopez’s polemical project. Arctic Dreams is in part a series of dispatches on despoliation, the consequences of ‘the ...”

“... poet; but I do not see how we can assert that it is a higher and fuller form than that used by Homer or that used by Dante. Even the most capacious of the ancient genres, epic and tragedy, are vantage-points from which certain things – and only certain things – can be seen and shown; other vantage-points, those of epigram or comedy (or lyric), are ...”

“... guessed (the ancient world didn’t normally eat meat – it’s part of the superman image of Homer’s heroes that they eat it every day); there was also the universal fish sauce (made from concentrated brine), and ‘axle grease’, the pork fat which you used to cook food or treat frost-bite. The tablets themselves represent another tribute to ...”

“... it came out of Kafka’s waistcoat, but for the fact that it probably has as many provenances as Homer: Borges, Pirandello, Beckett ... It is perfectly engrossing, bred by plausibility out of a vacuum. Everything flows from its opening sentence: ‘For many years now I have been living in an old flat in the heart of the city with my brother, who is ...”