“... moral action, punishment, religion, liberalism, fascism, communism, education, war, sex, Plato, Marx, Freud. Some of these essays are dated, others slight, but there is plenty of interest here for readers other than the dedicated Collingwoodian. I found ‘Economics as a Philosophical Science’ and ‘Punishment and Forgiveness’ especially fresh ...”

“... verbal abuse, Glesca style’ around the dining table, from philosophical disputes (‘This bloke Plato – a right flannel merchant, eh?’), to the hilariously unequal encounter between a bubble-car and a man swathed in mummy bandages, Torrington translates Glasgow into ‘Laughsville’. His language is a constant delight: a stream of doggerel, quips and ...”

“... spit-roast chicken and a salad dressed with ‘oil of the mountain olives worthy of the palate of Plato’, washed down with the local wine ‘out of raised pitchers, and possessing more soul, and penetrating the soul more deeply, than many a poem or sacred book’. (There is no indigestion on this occasion, of course.) This scene with the country wine ...”

“... the treatment is necessarily selective: for example, ten pages on Homer, six on Hesiod, nine on Plato, 12 on Virgil, 20 on Enoch, 17 on St Paul, two and a half on the Gospel of John. Bernstein’s task is easier, and he does understandably better, when his author has a coherent and argued view. But his prose accounts of heroic verse are irredeemably ...”

“... and pursuing aims and goals of our own. The contemplative picture of knowledge that dates back to Plato is an entirely misleading one, for a being without aims whose only life consisted in contemplation would not have a language to enable it to describe the world in the first place. And a creature all of whose beliefs turned out, per impossible, to be ...”

“... and excited essay by Gerard Casey about how T.F. made him read Jacob Boehme, whom he preferred to Plato – ‘that flighty one: honest Jacob has the hammer that rings my bell.’ Gerard Casey is a Dorset resident of Welsh upbringing: he farmed in Kenya with T.F.’s brother, Willie, and married the daughter of their sister Lucy. He writes about religion in ...”

“... if it is suggested that a prophet may speak more truly than he knows, the floodgates open, and Plato, Virgil and the author of the Prometheus Vinctus may be held to have foretold the coming of Christ.) This persistent misinterpretation of Scripture has undoubtedly affected the Gospels’ presentation of events; on occasion indeed (as with the Nativity at ...”

“... polis to the gay bar, the history of ideas would indeed seem at times no more than a footnote to Plato. Mutability may provide the book’s subject-matter, but it is treated in a remarkably invariant way. For political radicals, it is precisely the fact that things don’t change all that much – Marx’s paralytic ‘nightmare of history’, to snap out of ...”

“... the French philosopher Henri Bergson was a worldwide celebrity, ranked as a thinker alongside Plato, Socrates, Descartes and Kant. William James thought Bergson’s work had wrought a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Lord Balfour read him with great care and attention; Teddy Roosevelt went so far as to write an article on his work. People climbed ...”

“... the story of the phantom Helen are given in Aeschylus and Herodotus, and it is told explicitly in Plato’s account of Stesichorus’ recantation. Stesichorus was forced to repent his unjust description of Helen: she never went to Troy, he claims, it was her phantom that was fought over. Paris was a simpleton, beguiled by a counterfeit. Helen simply was not ...”

“... doesn’t it come from the Greek hustera (womb/uterus), echoing the theories of Plato and Hippocrates on the erratic wanderings of the womb in women deprived of sexual intercourse? And yet it’s Huston who has it right: Charcot explicitly rejected the ‘uterine’ theory of hysteria, and for this reason recognised the existence of hysteria ...”

“... of Tarentum, who served his city as a general and whose work was an important influence on Plato. And then there was Archimedes. Archimedes was not among the first generation of Greek mathematicians, but became the most celebrated in antiquity. Tradition had him as a relative of the royal house of Syracuse, but all the stories about his life cast him ...”

“... a ‘cogently worked through universe of thought’ that puts its author on a level with Homer, Plato, Dante and Shakespeare. Turner sees a theological meaning in its incompleteness. Like the world in Thomas’s understanding of it, this finest of all works of theology is shot through with silence. Turner makes much of what one might call the anonymity of ...”

“... poet. Solon in old age, on hearing one of her songs, wanted to get it by heart before he died. To Plato Sappho was the Tenth Muse. Romanticism has seldom had a more difficult case to handle. She is credited with nine books, mostly sorted into different lyric metres: the first book alone, consisting entirely of poems written in the Sapphic stanza, totalled ...”

“... in a set of keen young readers and writers, girls and boys – they shared around Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Hugo, Proust and Yeats as well as Michael Arlen, Clemence Dane, P.G. Wodehouse and G.K. Chesterton. Johnson kept lists of all the books she read (90 in 1931, although she was working full time), with ...”