“... signor Contino to himself as he waited on a railway station in Vienna. Freud, our era’s peer to Aristotle in analytic imagination and an informed Classicist, agreed with Aristotle’s Poetics in placing Sophocles’s Oedipus the King at the centre and summit of Greek tragedy. Yet Greek mythology provides another ...”

“... the Liar paradox, or who regards Principia Mathematica as the greatest contribution to Logic since Aristotle, would be well advised to attempt the task.) Levy’s story of Moore’s life ends in 1918, when Moore had at least half of his philosophical career ahead of him, while his account of the years before 1918 focuses upon the Apostles to an extent that ...”

“... stories if you like, joined together in the middle: a story not a plot, because it does not follow Aristotle’s rules, though it does have quite a turn-up in the middle. Act I: Scientia/Knowledge. The emergence of an intellectual: not exactly Faust – though St Bernard would think so and Clanchy at one point speaks of Abelard as ‘gambling against his ...”

“... the physiology of sight. He has a tendency to recount the discoveries of modern science when Aristotle would be more to the point, and he seriously underestimates the number of people executed for witchcraft in early modern Europe. But these defects, like the fact that neither Ekirch nor the many people who read this book in draft have ever, it ...”

“... who works out who the prospective murderer is by immersing himself in the theory of comedy, from Aristotle to Kierkegaard. The joke is that in real life, intellectuals are no more use than comedians. Both the policeman and the comedian, whose audience the assassin characterises as ‘Radio 4-listening, Guardian-reading, Pinot Grigio-swilling middle-class ...”

“... of the ordinary bodies can be seductive, too, especially when confined to stories and images: as Aristotle points out in the Poetics, we enjoy representations of insects and corpses; we also thrill to horrible creatures – boggarts, bogles, guhls in the Middle East, bunyips in Australia – which would frighten and disgust us if we ever encountered ...”

“... as somehow unnatural. The family name Phalacrocoracidae – ‘bald ravens’ – was derived from Aristotle, who called the cormorant ‘hydrokorax’, ‘water raven’. Like the raven, to which it bears a metaphorical though not morphological relationship, the cormorant still has an aura of ill omen attached to it. This aspect of Wires’s book adds an ...”

“... the other two. Pecuniary anthropology is very, very perilous. In the absence of evidence, both Aristotle and Adam Smith made implausible conjectures about the origin of money. Bernstein rushes right in after them. Because gold must be mined, panned or dredged and often only with great difficulty, because it throws back light, doesn’t rust at all, is ...”

“... demand. In practice, the demand for clarity becomes a call for greater precision. Yet, as Aristotle wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics, ‘it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.’ Or, to quote the aphorist James Richardson, ‘past a certain point, more precision ...”

“... of satisfaction – what the late Martin Hollis called ‘microwatts of inner glow’ – not, as Aristotle did, as a harmony between character, deliberation, action and circumstance. For Aristotle, being ‘happy’ (the usual translation of eudaimon) depends on a disposition to make correct practical judgments. It also ...”

“... by overwork and retributively blinded like Milton’s Samson. These setbacks change his views (Aristotle would call this anagnorisis) and open him to the sense of hope brought in the closing lines by partnership with Aurora, who describes to him a vision of the New Jerusalem. Prins shares Aurora’s ability to extrapolate from particular griefs to the ...”

“... is very good at noticing that things are unexpectedly like other things, a power certified by Aristotle as an indication of high intelligence: ‘a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars’; he adds that the gift is innate and cannot be acquired. It was valued just as highly by the 17th-century concettisti, some of ...”

“... Woolf wrote as an editor and publisher really are models, evidence of an ethical discipline Aristotle would have approved: where necessary firm without anger, or when anger is proper and unavoidable, temperately angry. He was generous, as when he insisted on paying Freud royalties for works for which he had earlier contracted without incurring an ...”

“... shows that the old class conventions of theatreland are in some sense still alive and well. Aristotle, who would presumably have approved the class conventions of Rattigan-type theatre – he thought the best plots were only to be found among the best families – would not have cared for the modern free-for-all; and neither probably would ...”

“... one can enigmatically say that carnival and metaphor, inversions of normal cultural style, may, as Aristotle possibly hinted, be enemies of the normal and the literal, without being enemies of the truth. And since in our own time we have seen a major change in the understanding of signs, and also a serious reappraisal of the meaning of carnival, it may appear ...”