“... the doctor, but I can tag along if I want). She has read, or rather ‘plunged into’ everything: Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, Montaigne, Pascal, Bertrand Russell, Thoreau, Schopenhauer and Oprah; Tolstoy, Woolf and McEwan; Adam Smith, the Dalai Lama and Malcolm Gladwell. Everything. And having emerged dripping with all that wisdom, she has at last managed to ...”

“... does his writing on the beach, with Tadzio in full view to serve as his inspiration. According to Plato, whose Symposium and Phaedros Mann had absorbed, creativity is one of the ‘higher’ fulfilments of love, and looking back in 1919 he re-created that inspiration: ‘Do you remember? A higher intoxication, an extraordinary emotion came over you and cast ...”

“... and electric ray. He extols the prophets and sages ‘who came from Egypt’, among them Jesus, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Empedocles and Alexander the Great. ‘In Egypt many of the sciences were born that made the world civilised and prosperous, such as Greek medicine,’ he writes. He folds the great Greek philosophers into Egypt’s own ...”

“... Numerous (the quotation that starts halfway through line two is probably from an academic study of Plato): There are things We live among ‘and to see them Is to know ourselves’.Sixteen syllables across three lines; four words that tend to operate loosely (‘things’, ‘live’, ‘see’, ‘know’) but couldn’t be clearer here; no figures of speech ...”

“... is most at risk is us. The eugenic ideal, which has been around in Western cultures at least since Plato, continues to tantalise some. Indeed, in the Sixties, when the genetic code of DNA was worked out, biologists here and there began calling for a new but sanitised eugenics, for human biological engineering free from racial and class bias and devoted to ...”

“... first story is about the shift, between Greek times and now, towards emphasising the inner life. Plato’s picture of the soul ruling the body does not make much of the inwardness of the soul. The modern stress on individuality is linked to awareness of our complex inner life. Taylor gives a subtle and complex account of how this awareness has a history, and ...”

“... are reconciled in various philosophical theories, but there still remains the uneasy feeling that Plato and Tolstoy, who expressed their disdain of all such reconciliations, were closer to the subject-matter, just because they each plainly felt the power of art over their emotions as strongly as anyone ever has; and at the same time they had reason in their ...”

“... Edward Ponderevo, promoter of the world-famous patent medicine Tono-Bungay, as they did those of Plato and Marx. For one thing, did he not, just like Uncle Ponderevo, construct his campaigns around slogans? And do not the slogans – ‘the competent receiver’, ‘the Open Conspiracy’ and ‘the socialist world-state’ – have a ghostly likeness to the ...”

“... direction to recognise that it exists. For all I know, it may be the ineluctable condition – as Plato long ago argued – of all art, which must glamorise, or domesticate, even that which it most deplores. And when the theme is as inherently glamorous as money the danger is doubled. Is America really, then, the moronic inferno? Contrary to the impression ...”

“... language, writing and laughter. We poor, bare, forked animals, we featherless chickens, as Plato called us, have covered ourselves with multi-coloured hose, beribboned and ruffled partlets, wide-brimmed berets topped with clusters of dyed ostrich plumes and – most startlingly in the days Rublack surveys – ‘peas bodies’, padded belly pillows ...”

“... cloak, walk in the streets right through the middle of town, and publicly interpret Plato, Aristotle, or the works of any other philosopher to those who wanted to listen to her. In addition to her expertise in teaching she rose to the pinnacle of civic virtue. She was both just and chaste and remained always a virgin; however, because she was ...”

“... convicted seemingly at random. Socrates, who had the good fortune to be memorialised by his pupil Plato, meets his fate halfway, refusing to apologise, challenging the jury to convict him, refusing Crito’s offer to help him escape after his conviction, and electing to drink poison in his own time. Saint-Méard, whom Kadri uses as an exemplar of the hand of ...”

“... have always divided on the necessity of supernatural sanctions for morality, and ever since Plato, many have been divided within themselves. In mid-Victorian Britain, Mill’s view that a somewhat diluted ‘religion of humanity’ would provide quite enough support was very much the minority view; Mill thought that solidarity with our fellow human ...”

“... Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and John Adams as the American equivalents of Plato, Aristotle, Cato and Brutus, while the wider culture acknowledges the near-superhuman qualities of the men of 1776. The founders in their periwigs, breeches and frockcoats hold a secure place in the popular iconography of American freedom, alongside ...”

“... in the assault on mimesis. Now he has tentatively and scrupulously set out to rehabilitate it. Plato argued for excluding the poets because he considered that their mimetic activities would tend to undermine the social order. Modern French critical thought, however, has insisted that ‘realist’ writing is no longer subversive. The ‘scandalous’ texts ...”