“... an alternative, secret tradition of revealed knowledge. Faustus’s discarding of authorities – Aristotle, Galen, Justinian and St Jerome are named in the opening soliloquy – is in the iconoclastic spirit of Paracelsus, who cast the medical Canon of Avicenna onto the St John’s Day bonfire in Basle, and of Cornelius Agrippa in his sweeping ...”

“... where they did their best work. Like so much else, it all began in Greece. Pedants still call Aristotle the Stagirite after his city of birth. Archimedes was a research student in Alexandria before going home to make Syracuse the Berkeley of his day. Nevertheless children aren’t attracted to the sciences. I’m not at all sure that the choice against ...”

“... in the rhetorical devices which shape character, and her concern with rhetoric extends from Aristotle to Kenneth Burke, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. There is a suggestion that reading characters is a form of ‘ethical self-fashioning’, even if the character is a villain or, for male readers, ‘woman as Other’. Desmet offers at the outset what ...”

“... hand. She tried unsuccessfully to run an English salon and to preserve sanity by keeping Plato and Aristotle at her bedside; but that did not stop her dancing with the equivalent of toy boys in the ominously named Patent Leather Room. Meeting Chaplin, she said he did not look as funny as she had expected, and he replied: ‘Neither do you.’ The on-off affair ...”

“... commerce and coinage, and the capacity for abstract thinking which found ultimate expression in Aristotle and Plato. It would be ridiculous to say George Thomson’s ideas are refuted, or even contested, by such an argument (and he is unmentioned in the book’s bibliography). But the turn of thought is characteristic of An Unfinished History. Its writer ...”

“... with G.H. Lewes’s Biographical History of Philosophy, he had worked his way through Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel. For most Plebs students, however, what little was then available of Marx and Engels was insufficient to fulfil this philosophical quest. Marx might have shown that changes in ideas resulted from changes in ...”

“... defined in terms of a ‘heroic’ degree of virtue – an idea which goes back, via Aquinas, to Aristotle. The methods for recognising the possessors of such virtue became more bureaucratic, in Max Weber’s sense of the term: in other words, recruitment procedures were standardised and formalised. In the trials for sanctity the evidence was graded and ...”

“... as social significance. He knows, really, that criticism is an ancient discipline beginning with Aristotle and Classical rhetoric, and concentrating its expertise on the techniques of literature, drama and oratory. (At least, he knew it when he wrote Walter Benjamin.) But here he must pretend that criticism in England began with the Enlightenment and the ...”

“... the character-revealing power of the face and bodily bearing, was attributed in the Middle Ages to Aristotle himself. Such ambivalence persisted into the 18th century. Diderot often respectfully alluded to physiognomy in his philosophical writings and applied it in his fictional character descriptions. Sterne, on the other hand, arranged that Walter Shandy’s ...”

“... de futuro and de praesenti spousals. And so on. She does not know what ‘hubris’ means, and Aristotle would not recognise her use of hamartia. The textual critical foundations of her work are old and rotten. She claims to follow received opinion over dating, but does not hesitate to put Lucrece before Henry VI, Timon before King Lear and Pericles after ...”

“... most members of the ‘pull yourself together’ school, took this principle to be axiomatic (pace Aristotle, Blake, Freud). Since a paralysed individual can in fact feel fear, the theory is patently false. James later modified it in such a way that the perception of a visceral response becomes the emotional experience. You feel fear, as an unacknowledged ...”

“... heavy and ill-placed gland. Plato and Galen regarded the head as the seat of rationality, but Aristotle, that object lesson in encouraging us to beware of armchair brains, revived the Homeric view, and for centuries taught us to think of the brain as no more than an elaborate cooling-plant for the organism. The emergence of our modern views can be traced ...”

“... he so coveted. He knew that small, highly visible displays of enlightenment, like hiring Aristotle to tutor his son, could win him support among sophisticated Greeks. It would be a strange irony indeed if, after all the ancient Athenians did to unmask and resist him, Philip succeeded in winning the hearts of their modern heirs. Yet it appears this is ...”

“... means the book ends up as a monument to error’s beguiling vitality, and evidence of what Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, called the ‘one thousand forms of error’ in contrast to the (impoverished) singularity of truth. In Areopagitica, a defence of freedom of expression, Milton made an even bolder case for the ethical importance of getting ...”

“... man seemed harmless enough – a cultured monarch who had brought poets and thinkers, including Aristotle, to his court – and his new power might, some Athenians hoped, provide a counterweight to that of their neighbouring rival, Thebes; it might even, as the essayist Isocrates fervently urged, bind the Greeks together in a retaliatory war against the ...”