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“... the undergraduate John Henry Newman was delighting in the inexhaustible metaphorical riches of Aeschylus at Oxford, the students of Maynooth were being fed a philistine diet of papist apologetics and garbled chunks of scholasticism. It was well nigh impossible, given this dismal context, for the 19th-century English Catholic church to produce a major ...”

“... would have been dismayed by this grandiose inflation of their literary hackwork. And who knows how Aeschylus or the author of Beowulf regarded their craft? It would be rash to assume that they thought of it in the same way Shelley did. Not all societies have shared our conception of art, grouping poets with sculptors and musicians rather than ...”

“... not necessarily in a good way. In the end, he got the last laugh. We have seven plays each from Aeschylus and Sophocles, but Euripides’ corpus was augmented by the chance survival of a Byzantine manuscript which contained nine of his plays arranged in alphabetical order. Nineteen plays have been attributed to him, of which eighteen seem to be definitively ...”

“... betrayed under threat of castration, keeps passing and overhearing an open-air production of Aeschylus (‘The curses are being fulfilled,’ and so on), the Conrad of The Secret Agent, the Malraux of La Condition Humaine, and the Joyce of the ‘Nighttown’ portion of Ulysses, are some of the closest non-Latin parallels that come to mind. As in his ...”

“... the poet felt the genius of four separate artists, the ‘finger-touch of Plutarch and Aeschylus and Michelangelo, assisted by Rabelais’: there was ‘something farcical about the scene, such as Shakespeare put in his blackest tragedies’. Always intensely literary in his responses – he never forgot how Junius Booth, the father of Lincoln’s ...”

“... he read and read: George Eliot, Dickens (‘noble and healthy’), Charlotte Brontë, Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, Daudet, Zola (‘healthy stuff and clears the mind’), Longfellow, Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe. He approves of Goncourt because he is ‘so conscientious, and so much toil goes into it’. He is himself an excellent ...”

“... narrow view of literature, excluding an enormous number of intriguing fictional figures, from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the witches in Macbeth and Milton’s God to Swift’s Gulliver and Dickens’s Fagin. Some literary characters are meant to be freaks, caricatures, emblems or plot functions, whatever the dogmatic humanists may consider. Whereas a ...”

“... arresting and torturing thousands of their opponents. Nor did it stop them adding the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles to their already extensive list of banned works. The coup earned the colonels condemnation across the globe, and few were sorry when the regime was brought to an end in 1974. But neither the overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974 ...”

“... assert that these tendencies have all been transcended. The high praise (Wagner is compared with Aeschylus and Demosthenes) and the criticism were written before Nietzsche arrived in Bayreuth, which turned out to be a disappointment causing ferocious bouts of psychosomatic malaise. From now on his criticism of the master and the works of his last phase will ...”

“... Master of Trinity and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in brilliant emendations of the text of Aeschylus. In 1662 Richard Bentley, one of the greatest critical scholars, was born near Wakefield. In 1700 he became Master of Trinity, and despite continual battles with the fellows survived until the age of 80. Bentley was an outstanding textual critic. His ...”

“... burden of the past’; a re-imagining of the past, illustrated here by re-imaginings of Aeschylus and Blake, Byron and Pound, gives us poems containing more history than they themselves were aware of, and affords us a chance to break with the Kantian aesthetic of disinterest, to see poetry as concerned with knowledge and with present and also future ...”

“... is not included in the Oxford Book, yet it is a mosaic of weirdly literal translations from Aeschylus and Sophocles. Lines like ‘sailing on horseback, or with feet for oars?’ are ludicrous but in a certain sense they are thoroughly Greek. If we want from a translation not just an extension of English literature but some notion of the way images and ...”

“... Peter Brook wrote an experimental play, Orghast at Persepolis, merging the myth of Prometheus with Aeschylus’ The Persians, which was staged at Persepolis as part of the Shiraz Arts Festival. Subsidised in part by the Iranian government, actors from twelve different countries performed entirely in ‘Orghast’, a language invented by Hughes and described by ...”

“... The depth of this influence reflects Wagner’s own versatility, and modest self-perception as an Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Beethoven rolled into one. At the start of the 20th century, as Ross puts it, Wagner ‘was like a massive object in space, drawing some entities into its orbit, making others bend just a little as they moved along independent ...”

“... the only one. To get an acknowledgment of eros between Achilles and Patroclus we have to turn to Aeschylus. The relevant fragment from his Myrmidons, with its talk of ‘reverence for awesome thighs’ and ‘kisses thick and fast’ (Davidson’s translation), survived precisely because it raised later eyebrows. It is also, to the best of my knowledge, the ...”