“... he said, have heard the story. So have we, and this was already an old sort of story by the time Plato told it. He has made it seem more real by telling a local, recent version, but he would have known the mythic one quite well: for in the story of Perseus, the king and his court, who had sent the hero for the head of Gorgon Medusa, had to look when he took ...”

“... thinkers, ‘the cave of the ordinary’ (Cavell’s phrase) harbours within (and not without, as Plato and other metaphysicians have insisted) a transcendental prospect: the astonishing recognition, available to anyone, that the everyday life one routinely experiences in a mood of quiet desperation (Thoreau), or of silent melancholy (Emerson), or of bedimmed ...”

“... but also in poems like ‘Agoraphobia’ and ‘Snake’. The quotation from Plato at the beginning of the book seems apposite: ‘And if the soul, too, my dear Alcibiades, is to know itself, it must surely look into a soul.’ If Swimming in the Flood is Burnside’s best book, The Dumb House is his worst. His desire to steer away from ...”

“... curly hair’, others with a more inclusive agenda allowing ‘blackness’ to extend to Euclid, Plato, Jesus Christ and Alexander the Great. This is a bald outline of ideas and claims which vary considerably in detail and in emphasis in the different texts which advance them. Until recently, they were most commonly associated with the fringe figure of ...”

“... appeared to fudge the meaning of a Greek word for anal intercourse as well as the attitude of Plato and other ancients to it. Sympathetic to Nussbaum, the article stresses the discrepancies between legal discourse and humanistic inquiry, but also asks edgily whether scholars should ‘sacrifice their intellectual standards when they enter the public ...”

“... to understand the Baron de Charlus’s homosexuality, ‘reassured himself by recalling pages of Plato, lines of Virgil, because, being mentally as well as physically blind, he did not understand that in their day to love a young man was the equivalent (Socrates’ jokes reveal this more clearly than Plato’s theories) of ...”

“... the simple, but in the 1870s radical, claim that a student should not just be able to translate Plato, but should also know something about the Theory of Forms). An engaging workaholic, and not a particular focus of anecdote (though there is a donnish myth about his serving up a pet donkey for dinner, to its erstwhile owner). His contemporaries must have ...”

“... of the 19th century, these two poems were practically all that was known from the work of the poet Plato called ‘the tenth Muse’. Then, around the turn of the 20th century, some scraps of papyrus from an ancient rubbish tip at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt turned out to contain fragments of poetry – including substantial chunks of Sophocles, Euripides and ...”

“... but to imply that it could not have resulted from private enterprise is to fly in the face of Plato and of common sense, paradoxically united. Why cannot it be taken at face value as easily as its male counterpart? The implied reader apparently finds ‘rebarbative’ the Homeric poems’ ‘insistently male orientation and address’; yet female critics ...”

“... on the nature of pictorial art. The discussion moves rapidly, but clearly and sure-footedly, from Plato to Gombrich, from Kepler to Panofsky, from Pliny to Winckelmann; and a major part of its value is that it carefully traces the ways in which philosophical, psychological, physiological and art historical inquiries into various aspects of these questions ...”

“... and at 20 entered an Oratorian college, where he quickly wearied of theology but discovered Plato, devoured L’Astrée, the interminable novel which defined the new pastoral mode, and admired Malherbe, the architect of French classicism. He left in 1642 and returned to his father who, assuming he would eventually succeed him in his post, approved of ...”

“... Size, of course, is not a virtue in itself, and very large states have their own problems. Plato thought the ideal state would have a population of just 5040: ‘numbers enough for war and peace, and for all contracts and dealings’. Aristotle believed large states to be ‘almost incapable of constitutional government’, and that large populations ...”

“... in my parents. We are surrounded by live & rather pathetic objects.’ And in 1992 (quoting Plato quoting Thales): ‘All things are full of gods.’ If nothing in particular must be adored, everything may be.Such adoration often wore a sensual aspect. Like anything else of importance (goodness, understanding, God), adoration (or love, as we might as ...”

“... is the bulwark of civilisation itself. To the contrary, Rorty said: the great philosophers from Plato through Descartes to Kant are apostles of intellectual intolerance, and the only reason for reading their books is to bore yourself so rigid that you will never be tempted to pick one up again. On the other side he attacked the scientistic triumphalists who ...”

“... for instance, a running motif, is illustrated with examples which extend from Homer, Pindar, Plato and Thucydides to an altar at Olympia to appease a malevolent hero who causes chariots to crash, and a carpet-maker who weaves a boastful piece of self-aggrandisement into the textile itself. The cult of youth is illustrated by both a discussion of old age ...”