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“... open the possibility of a continuation or that the work is unfinished or has lost its conclusion; Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Lucretius, and Virgil’s Aeneid could be cited. Kings comes to a very abrupt ending; Jonah and Acts would be easily extensible. Modern readers take too much for granted the well-finished ending. Having thus alerted us to the dangers of ...”

“... Abraham! and he said, Behold, here I am.’ Even this opening startles us when we come to it from Homer. Where are the two speakers? We are not told. The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from ...”

“... with people who went clinically insane (Henry Jacob, John Leland, William Price), with claims that Homer was born near Caerphilly and that Britain was evangelised not by any Roman mission but by St Paul in person, and with amiable innocents and the fraudsters who preyed on them. Blood and Mistletoe certainly proves, as Hutton’s earlier works have also ...”

“... remarks, a ‘cogently worked through universe of thought’ that puts its author on a level with Homer, Plato, Dante and Shakespeare. Turner sees a theological meaning in its incompleteness. Like the world in Thomas’s understanding of it, this finest of all works of theology is shot through with silence. Turner makes much of what one might call the ...”

“... were not enough, their earliest prose and verse histories, which recall the substance or metre of Homer and were even on occasion written in Greek, thoroughly naturalised Aeneas in a hoary Latin landscape, marrying him off to Lavinia the daughter of ‘Latinus’ and, after filling in a few hundred years with some colourless ‘Alban kings’, making him the ...”

“... and when he finished it he seems to have felt about it much as Chapman did on finishing his Homer: ‘The work that I was born to do is done.’ He said repeatedly that the publication of the final volume left him nothing more to do; he would now (at 71) ‘do nothing for ever and ever’. In his well-known essay on Housman, Edmund Wilson made a special ...”

“... In Germany, together with Auden and, to a lesser extent, Stephen Spender, Isherwood embraced Homer Lane’s ‘doctrine of original virtue’, which held that ‘there is only one sin: disobedience to the inner law of our own nature.’ Every English inhibition must be de-repressed. In Germany the ‘gang’ formed a masonic – or, in Isherwood’s ...”

“... took the oath of office as president and Mellon resigned his ambassadorship. Within months, Homer Cummings, the attorney general, told reporters that he intended to look into charges that Mellon had under-reported his income and underpaid his income tax – the same accusation Mellon had made against Senator Couzens a decade earlier. Mellon spent the ...”

“... points as we drive past.CyCy has big gnarled paws and a voice like a buttock. He has been reading Homer and got some ideas. He doesn’t so much tell me his ideas as carve me with them. Cy is a Special Level Donor. He’ll up the annual donation by half if they get artists doing some real art not just bullshit brushstrokes.GilesCy’s son is deaf. He brings ...”

“... matter of luck, but the signs point to Euripides’ popularity in antiquity. He is second only to Homer and Demosthenes in the number of ancient copies of his texts that survive. All three were regularly read at school in antiquity. Still, we have lost far more of Euripides than we will ever recover.Until the discovery at Philadelphia, Polyidus was known to ...”

“... He asked Harrison which her favourite Greek author was. The prudent answer would have been ‘Homer’, Gladstone’s own favourite, but – to annoy, and not wholly truthfully – she replied ‘Euripides’, then notorious for his religious scepticism. Gladstone stomped off. And years later, when she had added to her existing duties regular stints as a ...”

“... I also suspect that chiefly novelists enter this kind of dream, that those who think of reading Homer or Dante are more likely actually to read them. This may be because novels themselves involve quite a lot of day-dreaming, a lot of associative world-making, whereas poems, even long poems, usually get us to concentrate firmly on the language and the matter ...”

“... of disaster itself. ‘Los Angeles is the city we love to destroy,’ Davis writes. Since Homer Lea inaugurated Los Angeles disaster fiction in 1909 with The Valour of Ignorance, his yellow-peril fantasy of Japanese invasion, Los Angeles has been destroyed, by Davis’s count, 138 times: 49 times by nuclear bombs, 28 by earthquakes and 10 by invasion ...”

“... person. There is more than a whiff here of that traditional antithesis (of which every age since Homer seems to throw up a variant instance) between the gentlemanly valour of skilled personal fighting and the mean upstart butchery of the missile weapon, or whatever new refinement of it calls for revision of received notions of gallantry at any given ...”

“... whether the perceived benefit is to get well or to get high. After the Trojan War, according to Homer, Helen gave Telemachus a draught of nepenthe – almost certainly a reference to a Theban opium – to ‘banish memories’ and ‘calm grief and anger’. I am not sure whether this was medical or recreational. The use of hallucinogens in mystical and ...”