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“... to grow that fancy lay not in the heart but in the head. The Mesopotamians, the Hebrews and Homer identified thought with the heart, and the brain, a mushy grey-cream mass to the casual eye, was regarded as an inconveniently heavy and ill-placed gland. Plato and Galen regarded the head as the seat of rationality, but Aristotle, that object lesson in ...”

“... by which we accept life and open our arms to its basic situations. All good writers, from Homer to Hemingway, have their own versions of it. If we accept his definition, all art would be as full of kitsch – the stereotyped formula of gracious living – as any Hollywood or Soviet film. What matters, surely, as he also recognises, is the purpose ...”

“... student, he uses masterly work to give him a structure (as, he notes, Joyce used Vico and Homer) – but tends to stretch or reduce. As one of his SF characters says: ‘You love him as a chunk of raw material you think you can mould.’ It is in exactly that way, of course, that some of us like Burgess’s work: as he determinedly instructs us (about ...”

“... fine conversation with Aldous Huxley on ‘a favourite topic: the poorness of all literature’: Homer was terribly overrated, Dante was hopelessly limited, Shakespeare was such a stupid man, Goethe was such a bore, Tolstoy was silly etc. We had disposed of nearly everybody, and Aldous was really enjoying himself – until a nasty doubt struck him: ‘What ...”

“... except a very modest scale, they do not concur with our intuitions, for we freely admit that Homer, Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Tolstoy are full of inconsistencies, and do not allow this to worry us. Secondly, we can distinguish theories which identify unity with an overall impression or a gestalt of the work from those which make a claim about the ...”

“... languages of antiquity: ‘Beginning with a mere smattering of the Greek conjunctions, I procured Homer, with a translation, and learned him all in 21 days. I learned grammar exclusively from observation of the relation of Homer’s words to each other; indeed, I made my own grammar of the poetic dialect as I went ...”

“... the Sumerians four thousand years ago. The most celebrated, and familiar, of these is the racing homer, a breed selected for its unrivalled navigational abilities. Once their enclosure, or loft, has been imprinted on them – something that happens when a bird is around six weeks old – homing pigeons will return to it for the rest of their lives, even ...”

“... Beauties of the Bosphorus (seven out of eight quarto volumes of steel engravings), the works of Homer, Milton, Sir Walter Scott, and so on and on and on. Not exactly a treasure trove, but getting so many books at once, with so few titles I would have chosen, moved me suddenly much closer to possession of my fantasy library. Some of the books were hard going ...”

“... the Rihlah whirls. ‘The Travels,’ Mackintosh-Smith writes, ‘is a DIY Odyssey by a homespun Homer and the yarn, as elastic as its spinner, is prone to stretch alarmingly.’ In line with contemporary literary practice, Ibn Juzayy used the works of earlier authorities (notably the 12th-century Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr) to flesh out his master’s ...”

“... governors of the Republic. You had to eat what you were given and not spare it a second thought. Homer had it right, Plato reckoned, when he ‘feeds his heroes at their feasts, when they are campaigning, on soldiers’ fare; they have no fish, although they are on the shores of the Hellespont, and they are not allowed boiled meats but only roast, which is ...”

“... finished, here we are at the very end etc etc. What mind of any strength – beginning with Homer – has ever come to a conclusion? Scepticism of that all-embracing order is the attitude that the weak-minded B. and P. are of course to be denied: they jump daily not to their own conclusions, but to those of the authorities and the opinion-formers of ...”

“... use as a collective threat from outsiders. The ‘silent majority’ (a phrase Nixon borrowed from Homer, who was referring to the dead) refused to acknowledge that prohibitionist legislation and its enforcement are indispensable preconditions for the growth of illicit supply. ‘In a repressive climate of this kind, more informal modes of regulation – which ...”

“... abstruse) Dialectic of Enlightenment traced ‘Enlightenment’ thinking back to the age of Homer. Foucault recast 18th-century Europe as the scene of a dramatic break in Western habits of thought, and darkly associated it with new, menacingly ubiquitous patterns of discipline and repression. Subsequent authors have often mistaken these radical ...”

“... beguiling Merlin. Maria apparently wanted them to run away together to an island mentioned in Homer, and he seems to have entertained this notion quite seriously, but couldn’t finally bring himself to take the leap. The crisis came when she responded to his wavering by threatening suicide. There was a violent scuffle near the Regent’s Canal, as he ...”

“... on Mount Olympus. Unlike the savage destruction taking place on the human battlefield below, Homer’s theomachy is an inconsequential farce, complete with name-calling and tearful outbursts. The gods are incapable of mortal wounding, and so their warring carries no import. This is a satire, not a human drama. If the Olympian gods show us what lives ...”