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“... party, Tony Ray-Jones’s group on deckchairs making the best of a cold day on Brighton Beach, Homer Sykes’s naked girls in a fairground peepshow. They all say ‘this is how we are,’ in black and white: something in colour – less wry but also less affectionate, a later picture by Martin Parr, say – would destroy the mood as surely as turning up ...”

“... one appreciates and admires Pope’s decision to get free of patronage by the long labour of the Homer translation. Thomson’s career – but what career? As a poet he winds down. He produced a great deal early in his life, and the productions of his early life were good. The Seasons is not a ‘great poem’ if we restrict that category by severe ...”

“... books, not parents. Often Modernist poets seem embarrassed by Mum and Dad: Ezra Pound’s father, Homer, is displaced by his son’s epic poem. Pound is his own hero, lonely and supermannish. One has to turn to his biography to realise how much MacDiarmid’s family sustained him as he wrote such superb poems of isolation as ‘On a Raised Beach’. In Auden ...”

“... and, worst of all, a panegyrist of empire: ‘the intention of Virgil was to imitate Homer and to praise Augustus through his ancestors’ (Servius). Texts which we have been made to read, and about which there are so many obiter dicta, are always peculiarly hard to reread. Voices of schoolteachers mingle with the accents of the poet (I still ...”

“... a vastly important contribution, not only to literary criticism – above all, in On Translating Homer – but to the criticism of contemporary life. Pater’s decadent streak is most un-Classical, though he rightly felt an affinity with writers of late Antiquity. But he wrote of Plato with understanding as well as sympathy, and it is not surprising that he ...”

“... was entirely about politics. His targeted states included Indiana, where a Republican senator, Homer Capehart, had based his re-election campaign on the demand to ‘crack down on Cuba’. Kennedy denounced Capehart and his allies as ‘self-appointed generals and admirals who want to send someone else’s sons to war’. He must have been encouraged by ...”

“... as ever’); in a country cottage you will find yourself entertained by someone who could pass for Homer’s swineherd Eumaeus. ‘Even the ferocious attacks of vermin, which soon find out an Englishman, are exactly described in the graphic accounts given by Aristophanes of similar sufferings in Greek houses of old.’ Recapturing this world of antiquity was ...”

“... it. For the ancient world, Sappho’s work represented the summum bonum of lyric poetry, just as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey did of epic, and recent discoveries, if not quite achieving the level of the ‘Ode to Aphrodite’, are elegantly written and emotionally appealing compositions. The frustration of classicists at being deprived of so rich a literary ...”

“... They have come to Italy to sell a property they have inherited from the person they call Uncle Homer, a man who appears to have had the gift for enjoying himself that they so conspicuously lack. The property is a house near Naples. They drive down in their Bentley – they are supposed to be English although Katherine has picked up a Swedish accent from ...”

“... than justice to differences. She is very good on American painting, and in particular on Eakins, Homer and Hopper: Eakins’s singers ‘produce Mendelssohn from within their trimmed and stiffened taffeta as naturally as they might speak or sigh at some pointed moment; the seams and frills are a little displaced by the action of breathing and show the slight ...”

“... generation. P.D. Huet, the first historian of the novel, summed it up in 1670: Heliodorus was the Homer of fiction. It could hardly last. Renaissance and Romance gave way to Seriousness and the Novel. To our eyes, the parentage is clear. Clarissa descends from the wordy sentiment, and Udolpho from the exotic violence, of Greek fiction; just as Tom Jones takes ...”

“... United States. Auerbach ranges through some of the mighty monuments of Western literature, from Homer, medieval romance, Dante and Rabelais to Montaigne, Cervantes, Goethe, Stendhal and a good many authors besides, scanning their work for symptoms of realism. His criterion for selection, however, is more political than formal or epistemological. The ...”

“... go in for the kind of stuff that used to have people rolling in the aisles of the music halls. Homer Simpson is a kind of Grimaldi, an air-guitar-playing, nacho-chomping version of Dan Leno: he does songs, he falls on his arse, he has trouble with machines, with self-worth, and he goes in for disguises, catchphrases, patter and multiple personalities. The ...”

“... Tai’. Cusk has glimpsed the central truth of modern life: that sometimes it is as sublime as Homer, a sail full of wind with the sun overhead, and sometimes it is like an Ikea where all the couples are fighting. ‘I wonder what became of the human instinct for beauty,’ she writes in The Last Supper, ‘why it vanished so abruptly and so utterly, why ...”

“... tales. It also helps if one remembers that Thucydides is the follower and rival of Herodotus and Homer, not just a political commentator on his own times. What will remain is a man of whose life and opinions we know little, and a writer who examines the horrors of war, the tangle of human motives, the glory and degradation of his own ...”