“... 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 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 ...”

“... world by creating the conditions of one that is wholly other. This is what the original Utopia and Plato’s Republic were aiming at. It is what we would call ideology which comes between the world outside and the shadows on the cavern wall. For Ricoeur, the utopian strategy can be the only possible escape – if escape it is – from the hermeneutical circle ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... man’ – and avoided his Great Books Discussion Group, which met each month ‘to chew over Plato, Augustine, Aquinas and other heavies’. But bibliotherapy seems to have sharpened the interest of other prisoners; San Quentin encouraged an implausible string of wannabe writers. Writing was a consolation; it was better than notching the walls, at least ...”

“... He is a man of wide culture and interests, quoting from and referring to philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer but finding everything human alien to himself. He sounds squeamish, contemptuous, cynical; sometimes like Malte in Rilke’s great novel (of 1910); sometimes like one of Chekhov’s tired, put-upon, dissuasive medical ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The great Victorian polymath William Whewell – master of Trinity, tidologist, translator of Plato, crystallographer, expert on German Gothic architecture and inventor of the word ‘scientist’ – said, regarding the scientific method: ‘An art of discovery is not possible, we can give no rules for the pursuit of truth which shall be universally and ...”

“... of the great Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek and master of Balliol, calling his Plato ‘the best translation of a Greek philosopher which has ever been executed by a person who understood neither philosophy nor Greek’. He is said to have kept a record of choice insults for use when the need arose,* and he certainly preferred the harsh ...”

“... the fruit of the last eight years of his life, are crammed with allusions to apocalypse, Atlantis, Plato, Eros, God, Anti-Christ, Prometheus, Doppelgängers, the Book of Revelation and the like. Yet if some of the contents are dippy enough, the tone is brisk, racy, occasionally pugnacious. In language somewhat less than Papal, he tells us that ‘the Spirit is ...”

“... probably trumped any notion that the self-control involved in not watching was preferable. In Plato’s Republic, Leontius fights the urge to look at a pile of executed criminals and, in succumbing, damns his own eyes for their greedy desire. St Augustine famously condemned this pleasure in his account of his friend Alypius, who was converted into an avid ...”

“... the most thickly populated, scatters references to Conrad (Joseph), Hesiod, Rilke, Shakespeare, Plato, Mann, George Eliot, Gide and St John. Quite how much Conrad may be coruscating on thin ice here and there is a question the book can’t help posing, as do the works of his fellow polymath and mandarin critic of modernity, George Steiner. Yet the ...”

“... almost universal praise since his own time, and in ancient traditions is famed as a just ruler. Plato presents him as a guardian of free speech and reasoned argument, Cicero as a model of righteous empire. According to Isaiah, he was destined to ‘make justice shine upon the nations’. In the 20th century, Iranian shahs put him at the centre of national ...”

“... and try still, to do both. But philosophers tend to operate on the assumption, inherited from Plato, that knowledge of the Good is not just necessary but more or less sufficient for virtuous action – that, put differently, most wrongdoing comes from moral ignorance. If this is your starting point, then it makes sense to spend your time coming up with ...”

“... consent’, later made famous by Chomsky, but Lippmann intended it in a positive way. Like Plato, he saw the public as a great beast or a bewildered herd, floundering in the ‘chaos of local opinions’. The herd, he wrote in Public Opinion (1922), must be governed by ‘a specialised class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality’: an ...”