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“... Underworld, Tony talks about the Dodgers gaining revenge for Bobby Thomson’s heartbreaking homer at the end of the previous season. Tóibín’s novel takes its own gentle revenge on DeLillo’s triumphant home run of a novel. It does so by presenting, with quiet accomplishment, an interested immigrant’s view of a sporting contest in which ‘luck ...”

“... as documentary. It’s the same with any group portrait, whether it is Ingres’s Apotheosis of Homer or the latest colour-mag line-up of the Best of Young British Novelists. Who’s new, who’s hot, who’s good, who’s not going to cut the mustard? The critical triage starts immediately. I remember lining up with my fellow Young Novelists of 1983, and ...”

“... paradoxes. They’re an expression of the narrator (who’s complex, nuanced, a man who quotes Homer and Shakespeare to explain how he feels), and they reflect what he learns about the nature of truth (hard to find, hard to articulate and hard to bear). The most telling paradox comes at the high point of his lobbying for information: ‘My father never ...”

“... an intriguing item,’ which Baines and Rogers ‘have not been able to identify’, surely means Homer Defended, an anonymous critique of Pope’s Iliad translation that Curll advertised in 1716). In his preface to The Case of Seduction: Being, An Account of the Late Proceedings . . . against the Reverend Abbée, Claudius Nicholas des Rues, for Committing ...”

“... exported classical ballet and classical music to prove its superiority: the US sent out Winslow Homer, Gershwin and the Boston Symphony. But in the end it wasn’t high culture that established the cultural supremacy of the US: in classical music and in ballet, the Soviet Union and its East European satellites could more than hold their own. In the long ...”

“... His new book, a vastly ambitious attempt to cover nearly every aspect of anger in antiquity from Homer to early Christianity, breaks fresh ground again. Despite a somewhat rambling organisation and quirky remarks like the one just quoted (what’s the evidence for neolithic views on revenge?), it is full of interest. Harris’s only serious omission is anger ...”

“... find himself beneath an olive tree.’ This is the pattern of myth, inherited from translations of Homer: a formulation that bears the imprint of classical grammar. The linguistic register, too, stands out from the surrounding sentences (‘awaking’, ‘beneath’). The ‘Mr da Silva’ that comes after the snatch of myth – in place of a neutral ...”

“... there. Until Freud, dreams were in the main proleptic, prophetic; they also, as we know from Homer and from Julius Caesar, contained secret knowledge of what had transpired but was still hidden from view: they were not fantastic, nor were they subjective. Classical and medieval ghosts enflesh – so to speak – concealed knowledge; it is easy to see why ...”

“... a scrupulous failure from a simple failure. Is it reasonable to limp in order to show that Homer or Henryson runs? Not always, obviously; but it certainly can be, especially when a translation makes a reader hear that the words they are reading are not quite the words of the original. So sometimes a Heaney half-rhyme can invoke the ghost of a Scots ...”

“... all day in various interesting postures of jouissance, dressed in loose crimson garments, reciting Homer to one another and sipping absinthe. And that was just the working day. There are problems with this vision, as there are with any ethics. Are all your powers to be realised? What about that obsessive desire to beat up Tony Blair? Or should one realise ...”

“... omniscience is to fill up his text with riddles and paradoxes. His claims for Verne as the ‘Homer of the 19th Century’ (on the grounds that he is ‘less an individual than a style, a symbol, a mythology’) may seem disastrously overblown. (Has Martin not read Moby Dick, one wonders?) Nevertheless, the critical agility on display in The Mask of the ...”

“... convincingly in relation to the contemporary discoveries of ‘simplicity and wildness’ in Homer as well as in the Highlands. Stafford shows that Macpherson, who as a child witnessed ‘the humiliation of his Chief and Clan’ in the aftermath of Culloden, might have had some reason to ‘see the world of his childhood as a lost paradise’ – even ...”

“... to specialised sorts of updating in their own verse. Logue in particular, with his versions of Homer, is engaged in the often valuable as well as always fashionable business of bringing the past in line with the tastes of the present. But Musa and Fitzgerald have done something more fundamentally worthwhile, as well as truly educational, which is to enable ...”

“... dependent labour, and to the essay on technical innovation. The three articles on ‘Mycenae and Homer’ are more than the others reserved for the specialist, but should be read for the sheer intellectual pleasure of following the intricate argument. I have some scattered comments on the remaining. The opening essay on the ancient city is more ...”

“... critics are now complaining. He would be unrepentant, perhaps citing Heraclitus once more: ‘Homer was wrong in saying: “Would that strife might perish from among gods and men.” He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe: for if his prayers were heard, all things would pass ...”