“... sometimes strangely stumbling) attempts at analysis by such early masters of self-consciousness as Plato and Aristotle. What was a word? How could meaning reside in a sound? Why are some sequences of words better than others, and how many dimensions of comparison are there? Some utterances are false but beautiful, others are true but ugly or boring, and still ...”

“... rip-off of O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra and Desire Under the Elms, with dashes of Plato and Rousseau and Camus thrown in. We have legal opinions, complaints, answers to complaints, depositions, more opinions, all done with admirable, patient attention to the detail and manner of the language of the law, touched with parodies and ...”

“... passions and habits to beasts, and this is part of the religious myth of humanity that comes from Plato into the Christian tradition. This world picture, contributing to human self-assurance, prevented men educated in our traditions from seeing the biosphere as it is, until very recently. In fact, civilised human beings are remarkable among animal species for ...”

“... limits. The doctors propagated the theory of female ejaculation and the wandering womb. Plato wanted an equal role for women – allowing for their inferiority in all things. Aristotle, as always a backer of the actual, thought the male fitter to command than the female. Against this background stand a few prominent figures or individual utterances ...”

“... If you have, let us say, a theory about man, and if you can only prove it by talking about Plato and George Washington, your theory may be quite a frivolous thing. But if you can prove it by talking about the butler or the postman, then it is serious, because it is universal. So far from it being irreverent to use silly metaphors on serious ...”

“... as the theme will bear: there is no further point in being glum about them, or calling upon Plato to support your saying that it is ‘a dangerous thing to treat people as actors because they tend to lose any secure sense of their own authenticity’. The most interesting parts of Coasting are the technical bits about winds, tides, what to do with the ...”

“... Historians have identified a variety of sources for Campanella’s idiosyncratic vision, from Plato to Thomas More. What no one before Noel Malcolm noticed – although it would be unmistakable to any student of the early modern Middle East – is the extent to which the city of the sun was modelled on the Ottoman Empire.From the Renaissance to the ...”

“... the Latin adolescere, to grow towards) aptly symbolises the heavenward state of growth to which Plato refers in the Timaeus’. The Catalogue raisonné provides a useful directory of drawings as well as paintings, and includes much valuable material (especially the photographs of untraced works) and information – although not as much information as we ...”

“... disobedience. Anyone, Cavell says in a recent essay, ‘The Good of Film’, can see the drama of Plato’s Apology, the doomed Socrates facing his stubborn or uncomprehending accusers.* And anyone can see the dramas, large and small, that Hollywood films lay out for us. But does anyone steadily see what we do to each other all the time? This is Cavell’s ...”

“... of brilliant pages Hartman links Lukacs’s early essay on the essay form with Walter Pater’s Plato and Platonism, and both with the ‘romantic irony’ of Schlegel. Although Hartman would not admit himself to the select company of those who have written the essay as ‘intellectual poem’ – apart from Schlegel, and sometimes Benjamin, it includes ...”

“... does he berate his heroes for not meekly submitting to the divine will: not before the time of Plato do Greeks try to determine what the gods want and condemn any opposition to it.Sophoclean heroes are human beings whose great qualities lead them to behave, so far as they are able, like gods. Mortals cannot do this with impunity, as characters who lack ...”

“... Karim reads Tolstoy, and Fauzia, to Jerry’s amazement, has books by Dante, Shakespeare and Plato on her shelves (‘Are these yours? Do you understand them?’). Where a character’s non-Englishness is marked through conversational phrases in Kiswahili, Gurnah sticks with commonplace roman rather than exoticising italics. He’s relaxed about ...”

“... by ‘questions’ without practical, or even comprehensible, answers: the questions not of a Plato but of a sophist, playing for ethical time. Selbourne’s standards of practicality can be guessed from his thoughts about how to cure one current social ill: the unwillingness of many young men to provide for the babies they beget. He says (plausibly ...”

“... gorgeous nonsense, which isn’t an insult, since gorgeous nonsense is what Coleridge once accused Plato of writing, perhaps with the Timaeus in mind. The prevalence and variety of apocalyptic thought in modern America is well illustrated in Paul Boyer’s book, When Time Shall Be No More (1992), which is specially interesting on the phenomenon known as the ...”

“... Morality in the 18th Century.* The book traces the history of the concept of moral beauty from Plato and Plotinus, through Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and into Kant, Schiller and Goethe. Norton explores the way this concept merged with Pietist religious traditions in German-speaking countries and suffused their moral culture. Simply put, the idea was that ...”