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“... was a Greek or a Jew, had been killed by a bomb in Shanghai in 1937, even that his given name was Homer – are hearsay, most of them floated by Gladys one day, taken back the next. ‘I really don’t know who he was,’ Stone told a researcher in the late 1970s. He added that his mother didn’t seem much interested in men. Stone half-believed that his own ...”

“... nearly blind figure briefly in motion, described him ‘wandering like King Lear’ and as a ‘Homer with vacant eyes’. At the 2011 show Degas and the Ballet at the Royal Academy, it was played on a loop in a side gallery, towards the end of the exhibition. I watched it about twenty times. He walks towards us, and seems to look at us; he walks towards ...”

“... shelves is the gay male epic. The word ‘epic’ casts a wide net, but, in the absence of a Homer or Milton or Proust, the primary claim to epic-dom (read: ‘epic dumb’) seems to be not depth of thought but depth of book, measured not in pages but inches. This is territory originally carved out – well, not carved exactly, more like landscaped ...”

“... mastery as it appears in the great creations of naming, recording and enjoying, in the worlds of Homer, Shakespeare, Milton or Dante. Kafka must find mastery in minuteness, in disappearance. Kafka’s sovereign perspective on psychoanalysis ought to have helped critics to detach from its constricting domain his own person at least. His struggle with his ...”

“... effect. Lie generates lie, and fake news generates chaos. After Agamemnon’s lying speech Homer compares his audience to the sea towards which the troops bolt in order to set sail for home. The ultimate consequence of Zeus’ lie is swirling elemental rage:The assembly was stirred into motion like the long sea rollersof the Ikarian deep, which winds ...”

“... been home since 1858 to a procession of American painters, including some of the greats: Winslow Homer, Frederic Church, John La Farge and William Merritt Chase. But the ground under the Tenth Street Studios had grown too valuable for painters. On a Thursday in November 1955 plans were announced to build apartments on the site and promptly the following ...”

“... with passages underlined or spines damaged or words such as ‘Rubbish’ or ‘Yes, but cf Homer, Od. iii, 151’ or ‘I remember poor Joyce saying the same thing to me’ written in the margins. Or inscriptions on the title page such as ‘From your devoted friend and follower, K. Marx.’ He even offered his readers membership of the Myles na ...”

“... hatred the literature of the point of view; I wanted, if my ignorance permitted, to get back to Homer … I wanted to cry as all men cried, to laugh as all men laughed,’ he is rousing in himself the emotion that will destroy the subjectivity he revokes. A recent essay on ‘Bad Words’ by the poet Denise Riley clarifies all this. ‘There’s nothing ...”

“... he is, as Hazlitt pointed out, ‘a writer of centos, and yet in originality scarcely inferior to Homer’. This patchwork quilt effect or, to use a favourite image of Hazlitt’s, this melting of scrap metal into statues, can be seen if we consider the repeated images of ugly, dissonant noise in Milton. In an account of the building of the Tower of Babel in ...”

“... in hyperspace. The work of the imagination in metaphorical genealogies is obvious. In Hesiod and Homer, for instance, the gods of earth and sky produce the Titans, Cronus and his sister, Rhea, who gives birth to Zeus and other Olympian gods. Achilles is a great-grandson of Zeus through his grandfather Aeacus; through his mother, Thetis, he is a grandson of ...”

“... like the Poetic Heads Blake produced for his patron William Hayley’s Turret House in Felpham: Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare and the boys. Trophies in whose glow the Sussex poetaster could bask, quietly absorbing their power.) But how much more interesting it would be, I thought, to discover in some south coast junkshop an engraved and ...”

“... standards closer to plain than to pretty and had a gait, somebody once remarked, like the oxen in Homer, she nonetheless radiated erotic significance. People felt it in her, just as she felt it in them: there was something here that mattered, though what it was remained impossible to convey in words. (Pictures are something else. The photographs Conradi ...”

“... means ‘long’). But though there were omissions, there were no silly inclusions; Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry James; and near the end was one poem that certainly might, in its intensity, be described as ‘short’ – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This almost ...”

“... and back with a couple of pints from the Powerscourt Arms under my Montparnasse belt through the Homer dusk. Often very moving and it helps to swamp the usual palpitations. But I disagree with you about the gardenish landscape. The lowest mountains here terrify me far more than anything I saw in Connemara or Achill. This habit of walking would fill one of ...”

“... editor points out, is ‘more reminiscent of Hamlet (an alter ego whom he frequently quotes) than Homer’. Their carefulness may be the result of censorship, as he makes clear in a letter from California in 1944: ‘I trust I am not guilty of a breach of military reticence if I suggest that, were this ban to be lifted, I could report nothing that would give ...”