“... speaking, from an ‘abrasive’ atheism to Christianity, ‘from being someone who thought that Plato was always wrong’ to ‘someone who thought that Plato was almost always right’. ‘The Island’ is the empirical world: should you swim out beyond the breakers, you will transcend sensory experience and discover ...”

“... our own century are those who have tried to follow through on the Romantic poets by breaking with Plato and seeing freedom as the recognition of contingency. These are the philosophers who try to detach Hegel’s insistence on historicity from his pantheistic idealism. They try to retain Nietzsche’s identification of the strong poet, rather than the ...”

“... it we would have in our hands the key to French painting, in much the same way as the relation of Plato to Socrates, for example, still seems the key to ‘philosophy’. The comparison could be pursued further. Greek philosophy and French painting (meaning the line from Corot to Matisse, from Sardanapalus to Ma Jolie) may be seen as events of equal ...”

“... in March). Names produce affinity (oikeiot-es) Socrates says of his namesake Young Socrates in Plato’s Statesman, or as Lévi-Strauss put it: ‘Un Jean est un membre de la classe des Jeans.’ Until very recently, most European countries fiercely resisted such typically English laissez-faire. You could not use surnames as forenames; you could not ...”

“... to Tristram Shandy, himself opening his remarks on that novel with a very apt citation from Plato’s Laws, to the effect that people should be sure not to be drunk or disordered when copulating, lest their offspring be physically or mentally impaired: for ‘the beginning, like a god,’ says Plato, ‘preserves ...”

“... ability to withstand drought, and to yield an oil that doesn’t smoke when burned). Echoing Plato, he articulated a hierarchy of human cognition in which the rational soul was the sovereign, reason the chief minister and the tongue the court interpreter. He described the extraordinary, explaining, for instance, the difference between talismans, which ...”

“... up’, and then, for the love of Leiden, he lets them go. It gives the lie to the passage in Plato: ‘What does the lover of beautiful things love? That they become his.’ Kaplan spent some of his boyhood a little way up the coast from the Norton. There is maybe something personal at stake here (or perhaps a mission civilisatrice). More than ...”

“... grammar is primitive or naive; and so it is, if we believe E.A. Havelock in his Preface to Plato, who found Homer paratactic whereas Plato set us on the opposite course, hypotaxis, which has governed us ever since. Citing Homer suggests that parataxis is peculiarly fitted to narrative, and Browning, quite apart from ...”

“... not much heard nowadays. The idea that politics could be a craft or techne, familiar to readers of Plato and Machiavelli, is well-nigh beyond superannuation. But even though there’s little bite left in the old dog, it can still bark at a full moon. Its main currency now is in conspiracy theory – or, with the recursive tic which marks this style of ...”

“... of an object is more true to the nature of that object than any other. Nominalists think that Plato’s metaphor of cutting nature at the joints should be abandoned once and for all. Proponents of nominalism are often described as ‘linguistic idealists’ by the materialist metaphysicans. For the latter believe that Dalton and Mendeleev did indeed cut ...”

“... socialist, ‘we had better yield the floor to the only truly great performer in that field, Plato.’ This is not to say that Schumpeter did not himself have a conception of what socialism was, or see why socialists like him leant in one direction rather than another. Socialism was a reaction to capitalism, which ‘inevitably and by the very logic of ...”

“... Thales, according to gossipy Plato, was walking abstractedly, watching the stars, when he fell into a well. I did that a few weeks ago, being preoccupied with the most elevated thoughts when I suddenly found myself lying at the bottom of the well of the NHS. This made me think about several things which no doubt have long been blindingly obvious to fellow citizens who keep their eyes closer to the ground ...”

“... more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: this was sensed instinctively by Plato, this greatest enemy of art that Europe has yet produced. Plato contra Homer: that is the complete, the genuine antagonism – there the ‘otherworldly one’ with the best of wills, the great slanderer of life; here its ...”

“... was 1978, and early days in computer science), he taught himself software programming on PLATO, Illinois University’s computer network. Powers sees his early development as formed by epiphanies. One such occurred during his MA studies: I was in graduate school studying literature, and my father died of cancer during my first year. I was 21 years ...”

“... Israel-Palestine, Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other, the 2008 crash (‘It is all there in Plato … down to the details of the hunched shoulders, the flickering screens, and the myopia’), the place of mobile phones in fiction and the rigours of writing (‘I know there is a lot of romantic bullshit spoken about the writing life, about the despair of ...”