“... Britain in his early twenties and spent some time pursuing a doctorate at Cambridge on Shelley and Plato. When Germaine Greer appeared with him on the Australian version of Parkinson, she said in that professionally challenging manner of hers: ‘What I want to know, Clive, is do you ever think any more about Plato and ...”

“... that one of the benefits of a study of history is that it is always possible to reverse, as Plato put it, an apparently fatal tendency towards decay, however late the hour …’ The weight of our planet’s unfinished history is, apparently, marshalled behind this concluding gesture. But of course, it is the gesture itself that counts. It has dictated ...”

“... untidy state of affairs. In fact, ‘mess’, like other key words here, is what critics following Plato and Derrida call a ‘pharmakon’, since it has a double set of connotations, one generally deemed positive (a pharmakon is a remedy) and the other negative (a pharmakon is a poison); the English word ‘drug’ carries the same two meanings. The ...”

“... the virtue that disposes one to proper, proportionate reactions of anger (o’rgai´). Nor could Plato in his Laws rule that a young man must endure his o’rgh´ quietly if he is roughed up by a senior citizen. Another piece of Aristotelian wisdom which Harris rejects is that even mild anger nourishes thoughts of revenge, retaliation, or getting back at the ...”

“... forms. The rationale for this otherwordly view appeared first in the Republic. Geometers, Plato observed, talk of perfectly round circles and perfectly straight lines, neither of which are to be found in the sensible world. The same is true of numbers, since they must be composed of perfectly equal units. The objects studied by mathematicians must ...”

“... after graduation! My friends soon disabused me. It was a ‘great books’ course. It began with Plato’s Republic and continued with the Bible, before going on to Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Smith and so on. There was, it seemed to me, little sign of contemporary civilisation. Fully occupied with delivering twice-weekly lectures on ...”

“... title. Ou topos is ‘not a place’ (but compare eu topos, ‘good place’); in Republic Plato contrasted his utopia avant la lettre, ‘Kallipolis’, the beautiful or fine city, with a banausic ‘city of pigs’. More’s Latin text harps on the notness of the place, or non-place, with further in-gags for humanist cognoscenti. Utopia’s river is ...”

“... are already … dreaming of the New Academy and have all but established it after the fashion of Plato’. So what if it was a pretentious drinking society? He would make antiquity live again, at the Aldine Press. In his prefaces, complaint is the major key. ‘You can scarcely believe how busy I am,’ he writes. He didn’t have time to eat, to ...”

“... by reason.’ Alan, he says, was recalling a phrase of Thierry of Chartres, himself recalling Plato. But many years before Alan or Thierry, the Emperor Henry III, dealing with a group of Czech sea-lawyers, had told them brusquely: ‘The law has a nose of wax, as they say in the vulgar, and the king a hand of iron.’ Henry was not recalling ...”

“... profound realism’ in this literature. Josipovici contrasts the attitude to death expounded by Plato and yearned for by St Paul. They welcomed it, as the abandonment of the uselessly material, but for the Greeks death brings sadness and pain. In a wonderful reading of the Biblical stories of David, and of Esau and Jacob, Josipovici rightly emphasises the ...”

“... II had lost control, and the opposition at once divided between Dion, the friend and pupil of Plato, and those who sought the restoration of full democracy. Plutarch’s typically brief and tantalising narrative also allows us here to catch a glimpse of a political ideology, openly expressed in an ancient Greek city, which saw an incompatibility between ...”

“... us say, ‘epistemology’ or ‘metaphysics’, he lectured on the early Greek philosophers, on Plato – this although most of us were Greekless – and on the major modern philosophers, varying his particular topics from year to year so that what one learnt from Anderson could considerably depend on whom, at a given time, he chose to lecture upon. (I know ...”

“... headed by the Pope. Aristotle, the scholastics’ darling, is tumbling into the pit to join Plato, his pagan philosophical predecessor. The lesson is clear: Scripture and Scripture only is what counts. All things necessary for salvation are contained in it, accessible to all who approach it, through Christ, with humility, faith and love. No need for the ...”

“... construct, immunises him against the ideological opportunism of the group; he is ‘closer to Plato than to Marx’, as he puts it. Nor does he share their credulity when it comes to getting in touch with the dead: there’s a jolly scene in which a medium is booked to try and speak with the lost leader, Lenin, in his mausoleum, and where, once she’s ...”

“... to oblivion. But it is fanciful to think that reason could bring power under its sway. Even Plato, that political arch-moralist, knew that getting rid of power was a non-starter. He thought that the rulers would have to entrench their rule, of which they were the main beneficiaries, by manipulation. As he notes in the Republic, his philosopher-rulers ...”