Search Results

“... more precise. Allegiances too, are more discreetly signalled: to Dante, Villon, Chapman’s Homer, among others; to the King James Bible and, in ‘The Spoils’, his last big poem before ‘Briggflatts’, to an array of Arabic, Jewish and Persian materials – Bunting served in Persia during the war and later became the Times correspondent in ...”

“... Samuel Richardson (‘O Richardson, Richardson ... I will keep you on the same shelf with Moses, Homer, Euripides and Sophocles’) caused French hearts to beat even faster. A steady supply of political pilgrims made their way across the Channel to observe the miracle of English government in action, while a fast-spending set around the younger princes of ...”

“... tribe’) in a merry, if mucky, competition. Parodying the heroic games in Homer and Virgil, booksellers first race to possess a tame poet created for them by the Goddess of Dulness (‘All as a partridge plump, full-fed, and fair,/She form’d this image of well-body’d air;/With pert flat eyes she window’d well its head;/A brain of ...”

“... fallen into the clutches of some latter-day equivalent of F.W. Newman, editor and translator of Homer, whom Arnold memorably pilloried for his obstructive pedantry and lack of literary tact. Jane, Arnold’s elder sister who partly functioned as a kind of epistolary superego for him, worried, with her moralising Lake District austerity, whether Matt ...”

“... go all the way back to the primeval smithy’s harnessing of fire. Henderson felt alternately like Homer wandering through the ruins of Troy, and ‘as if I had stumbled into a Mau-Mau camp and been recognised as the brother of Jomo Kenyatta’. In July 1953, he made an even more arresting discovery. Following a tip picked up in Aberdeen’s Castlegate ...”

“... because they don’t appear in the earliest layers of Indian and Greek literature (the Vedas and Homer). But West insists that they ‘must be historically connected’ because they correspond point for point and are not attested for any other people. In fact, a number of the features of this theory are attested in other cultures, and it isn’t true that ...”

“... care for the sufferer. He writes of the anthropologist John Layard, who had been psychoanalysed by Homer Lane in an attempt to overcome a nervous breakdown so severe that it at first caused physical paralysis: ‘annoyed by Auden’s refusal to love him and by Lane’s dying half-way through his analysis, Layard shot himself in the mouth.’ Something seems ...”

“... like David Dabyeen’s Coolie Odyssey* will go back to The Tempest, Blake and, most evidently, Homer in an effort to come to terms with colonialism. And Derek Walcott has for some years now read ‘Iliads and Odysseys’ (Chatwin’s phrase), Clampitt’s ‘middle of the earth ... stepmotherland’, into his chorography of islands: That sail which leans ...”

“... to the Golden Mean. The result is a comic sermon of extraordinary power. Rabelais could read Homer, Plutarch, Ovid, Genesis, the Psalms or the Gospels through the eyes of Lucian and then spin round on his toe and present them to us in a more straightforward way. But not even Lucian shared Rabelais’s keen awareness of the comedy inherent in the human ...”

“... the picture of health, his hands all scratches and with a cut or bruise on every knuckle, Horace, Homer and Virgil ever present to his mind, forthright and independent in his opinions, makes a thousand mistakes but corrects them himself ... It so happens that this thumbnail portrait fits Andrew’s younger brother, John Matthew, who was educated at ...”

“... the feudal Catholic Europe of the dethroned monarchs. So did the device of making a hero of blind Homer and blind Tiresias, as Byron and Shelley would make heroes of Tasso, Dante and England’s blind prophet Milton. Writers are problematic heroes for revolutionary activists, to be sure, since they still carry the smack of self-indulgence and self-creating ...”

“... the 18th century, critics were given to insisting that old books – the Bible, for example, and Homer – could be read with understanding only by those who considered the social conditions at the time of origin, and knew the individual early textual histories. Belated Enlightenment thinkers like Shelley and Marx soldiered on in this historical vein, which ...”

“... Poussin’: Orion, the subject of this landscape, was the classical Nimrod; and is called by Homer ‘a hunter of shadows, himself a shade’. He was the son of Neptune; and having lost an eye in some affray between the gods and men, was told that if he would go to meet the rising sun, he would recover his sight. He is represented setting out on his ...”

“... that poets are bending over backwards to please their princes. George Chapman dedicating his Homer to ‘Henry Prince of Wales’ anagrammatised his patron’s name into ‘OVR SVNN, HEYR, PEACE, LIFE’ by splitting the W of Wales into two constitutive Vs and then deeming them able to serve as Us, which again was doable then. This is done Very Visibly ...”

“... Pseudodoxia most of his facts come from his reading. Urne-Buriall draws on dozens of sources, from Homer and Herodotus to Cardano and John Stow, which Browne meticulously references in more than a hundred notes. He paid no mind to the divisions of knowledge of our more specialised age. Examining the urns and their human ashes leads him to consider how past ...”