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“... In The Return of Ulysses Edith Hall takes us on a tour of global culture high and low, mostly from the last hundred years, to demonstrate how Homer’s great poem continues to permeate our sensibility and imagination. She is an informative and enthusiastic guide, and the sheer wealth of her examples is impressive ...”

“... nasty things like wages and class struggles. They are so sordid!’The cartoon, reproduced in Edith Hall and Henry Stead’s People’s History of Classics, encapsulates several elements of the debate about classical education at the turn of the 20th century. In Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities and Society in England, 1830-1960, published ...”

“... from the moment when the narrator suggests that the ending of the Odyssey is no ending at all. As Edith Hall writes in The Return of Ulysses, Homer’s story has proved particularly attractive material for a postwar Europe trying to come to terms with the violence of its own history.1 Hans Erich Nossack is just one German writer who made the Odyssey his ...”

“... or more poetry collections and pamphlets, not to mention the essays and addresses assembled in Edith Hall’s edition of his selected prose. That teacher, commemorated but unnamed in the poem ‘Them & [uz]’, was so dismayed by Harrison’s ‘barbarian’ recital of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in a Northern working-class accent that he ...”

“... Hesiodic corpus, from the second half of the sixth century BCE. The Trojans, on the other hand, as Edith Hall showed almost thirty years ago in Inventing the Barbarian, had stood as a model of oriental hyper-civilisation since the fifth century BCE, when the tragedians of Athens co-opted Homer’s Trojans into the roles of their contemporary Persian ...”

“... contrasts strikingly with the passionate emotion of her songs.’ It’s most peculiar, as Edith Hall notes in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, that modern translations do not generally mark which parts of a tragedy were spoken and which were sung, although there is some difficulty, as Easterling admits in a footnote, over anapaests ...”

“... of workers at the arsenal after 1914.It was not the first attempt to house them. The nearby Well Hall Estate, now known as the Progress Estate (and a conservation area), was, according to The Buildings of England, ‘the first and most spectacular’ of the wartime estates built by local authorities in loose imitation of Hampstead Garden Suburb. One thousand ...”

“... enough to hang bells in’ was, apparently, the response of one American visitor to a portrait of Edith Sitwell in the Tate. Elizabeth Bowen, herself an imposing physical presence, described Sitwell in real life as like ‘a high altar on the move’, and Virginia Woolf, on first encountering her in 1918, noted that she was ‘a very tall young woman, wearing ...”

“... In the spring of 1907, a few weeks after Edith Wharton had met Morton Fullerton in Paris, she described him to a mutual friend as ‘very intelligent, but slightly mysterious, I think’. Eight years later, by which time her passionate affair with Fullerton was long over, Henry James, in one of his last letters to her, confirmed her first thoughts about the man who had fascinated them both ...”

“... sake of a greater cause. For the first phase of her life, that greater cause had been her mother. Edith Lytton née Villers had been a society beauty in her day. When Constance was a child, Edith praised her beautiful eyes and hoped that ‘the lower part of her face’ would improve. The main quality Constance’s family ...”

“... In 1957​ , six years before her death, Edith Piaf added a new song to her repertoire, ‘La Foule’ (‘The Crowd’). It wasn’t actually new, having been composed in 1936 in Spanish by Angel Cabral, an Argentinian, using the form of a vals criollo, a dance favoured by the Peruvian working class. Piaf heard it and asked one of her librettists, Michel Rivgauche, to compose new French lyrics ...”

“... Everything public, nothing private; total centralisation; no more ‘politics’ in the Tammany Hall or Westminster sense. And all with benevolent intent. What Bellamy offered was a works able myth. His was the world which Soviet Communism set about building. In parallel, and often under Soviet influence, socialist parties went the same ...”

“... on a saltmarsh, somewhere on the Northumbrian coast. Nearby are a church, a nunnery, a folly, a Hall and an iron-works. All of these buildings, but especially the yellow house, which faces the sea, are obliged to withstand the battering of strong winds blowing from the north-east. At the yellow house live Polly’s Aunt Mary and Aunt Frances, both too ...”

“... concerns the Boleyns, Elizabeth’s maternal relations. A dishevelled woman calling herself ‘Edith Boleyn’ had turned up at Hatfield, but her story was full of holes and she was dismissed. Days later she was found murdered, head down in a stream with her legs in the air. Footprints incriminate Edith’s estranged ...”

“... to believe that you are men in female attire.’ Stella was indeed one Ernest Boulton, music hall artiste and rent boy, and Fanny was Frederick Park, a trainee solicitor. At Bow Street police station they were arrested and charged with sodomy. Stella, it transpired, had been living as the wife of Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton MP, who promptly died of ...”