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“... sense. Bernard Williams rightly and proudly points to the precedent of one of his teachers, E.R. Dodds, whose The Greeks and the Irrational, published in 1951, remains one of the glories of the series. When Williams says in the preface to his own lectures that he is not primarily a Classical scholar, this is not meant as an apology: it simply tells us that ...”

“... to a prompt post-mortem. In 1940, anticipating a biography, he sent his friend and mentor E.R. Dodds a list of what he called ‘the best authorities’ on his life so far, ‘though each only from a certain angle’. He was 33 at the time and half-joking but a year earlier he had begun work on an autobiography, The Strings Are False. He had also recently ...”

“... ancient thought, at least in some degree, without importing modern prejudices.’ Murray and E.R. Dodds, his two predecessors in the chair, had both made the attempt, ‘and I shall do anything I can to follow them.’ The two closely linked themes that dominate these books are announced here and reiterated time and again: one is the contrast, indeed the ...”

“... of the effects of Greek ‘rationality’, for example, looks like a blown-up version of E.R. Dodds (The Greeks and the Irrational) – minus Dodds’s subtlety and (to be honest) intelligence. Nonetheless there is something exhilarating about the vigour with which both Bernal and Young attack that old, familiar myth of ...”

“... to observe, but the path they chose was the right one, and has led to the important work of E.R. Dodds in this country, Karl Meuli and his followers in Germany and Switzerland, and Louis Gernet and his school in France. These scholars have made a careful study of the new disciplines whose methods they have used, and have done so with all proper caution. That ...”

“... scattered with the names of the poets, writers and artists of his generation), but also with E.R. Dodds (Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford between 1936 and 1960) whose autobiography Missing Persons rather outclasses Dover in subtlety, style and reticence. Dodds was a much nicer person than Bowra, but (with as little ...”

“... been more wrong. Within months, MacNeice’s friend and first employer, the Greek scholar E.R. Dodds, brought out The Strings Are False, a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently re-edited Collected, we do not have all the MacNeice we could ask for. As McDonald points ...”

“... surprising, for Tolkien, unlike literary and linguistic scholars such as Erich Auerbach and E.R. Dodds who achieved and deserved fame in this century, was not an intellectual. The reasons why one might take up his scholarship or his fiction are not the same as those that make us read Mimesis or The Greeks and the Irrational – books that transformed, and ...”

“... mythos into logos at every turn, and so we tend to assume (despite the salutary lessons of E.R. Dodds in The Greeks and the Irrational) that our kind of scepticism about such things as oracles must have been generally shared by them too, especially by Athenians. Such an assumption is about as securely based as those evil demons progressive thinking has so ...”

“... of the U-boats, he wrote to his literary executor and old friend, the Oxford professor E.R. Dodds: In case any mug wants to publish any of my letters … I do not want any letters to my father or stepmother to be published as they nearly always contain some falsity. I also regret most of my undergraduate letters (esp. to Anthony Blunt) which are nearly ...”

“... the manipulations of the gods. Are we to take these claims as face-saving excuses, or (with E.R. Dodds) as serious beliefs? How can we tell? To respond to the portrayal of a passion by identifying with it as casual modern readers do proves only the modern belief in that passion, not its historical existence in the Homeric world in the same form. And if ...”

“... known, even during Thackeray’s lifetime, that his wife had gone mad, it was assumed, as E.R. Dodds put it in his pre-Ray Life, that Isabella was afflicted by a ‘cloud of gentle insanity’. In fact her descent into lunacy was shockingly violent. The climax came during a three-day sea crossing from London to Cork (Isabella’s family lived in ...”

“... but rather a genuine religious conversion. The later second and third centuries, which E.R. Dodds called an Age of Anxiety, were a time of creative churn and new religious possibilities, of mystery religions and salvific cults, syncretic borrowings from the Indus to the Atlantic. Sidebottom takes us straight to the most apt comparison: only a few years ...”

“... learned so much from Freud, forgot to mention him in his work on the Puritan family. As for E.R. Dodds, it’s unscrupulous of Gay to offer his Greeks and the Irrational as exemplary Freudian scholarship when its debts to Nietzsche and Malinowski are so clear, and when Classicists are, on the whole, so careful to distinguish between its doubtful paradigms ...”

“... As an Assistant Lecturer in Classics at Birmingham University he made lifelong friends of E.R. Dodds and Ernest Stahl, but evidently had mixed feelings about teaching and perhaps about provincial living: ‘Qu’allais-je faire dans cette galère?’ He was not the first Protestant Ulsterman to seem frugal of speech and déraciné. Perhaps his difficulties ...”