“... inverts a central tenet of the ideal known as ‘the rule of law’. Under the rule of law, as Plato put it, ‘law is the master of the government and the government is its slave.’ Where the rule of law prevails, nobody is above the law. The government too must answer to it in everything it does. It’s not only that the government can’t violate the ...”

“... implausibility a sign of its truth. The Old Testament was ‘the result of pillaging from Plato and Greek myth: Eve and the Androgyne, original sin and Pandora’s box … the sacrifices of Isaac and Iphigenia, and so on.’ Princes use religion – its ‘miracles, prodigies, oracles, mysteries, rites, prophets, feasts’ – as a spell, or ...”

“... centrally philological, would also have thought of themselves as being able not just to translate Plato but to do philosophy, and thereby contribute to a general cultural Bildung in which the whole person was educated, not just in history, but in how to behave, live and rule. Over the past century, of course, it has become difficult to talk about ‘the ...”

“... freedom ultimately drawn from Sartre with an implausibly depersonalising view of love drawn from Plato. Fusing those two things with the conventions of the realist novel was a profoundly interesting thing to have done, and for having attempted that fusion she certainly will always be thought to deserve a major part in the history of 20th-century fiction in ...”

“... North London drawing room; people travel through time; they consort with the embodied presences of Plato’s Ideas. The best of his poetry (the part of his work he was proudest of and believed to be the most original) presents the Arthurian myth of the Holy Grail refracted through a series of dense lyric pieces, as in: This is the way of the world in the day ...”

“... that attend new ways of encountering texts, Duncan wheels out (to use his term) the passage from Plato’s Phaedrus in which Socrates argues that writing makes humans inattentive and forgetful. He could have said a little more about the ambiguities of that dialogue and the ambivalences of its author. At one point, Socrates comes out with some ...”

“... idiom for an old way of thinking: the rationalist humanism that stretches back to Descartes and Plato. When Chomsky was starting out, his rationalism cut against the grain of conventional wisdom in philosophy and psychology. Both disciplines were dominated by a distrust of what Gilbert Ryle called ‘the ghost in the machine’ – the elusive, invisible ...”

“... money, which they use to cement their power. Democracy inclines towards toxic populism, just as Plato warned. Capitalism inclines towards self-serving oligarchy, just as Marx predicted. Each works only if the other is there.Wolf would like to think that democracy and capitalism suit each other, despite their differences. Both rest on an idea of individual ...”

“... available evidence, he was drawing upon his traditionalist, Wykehamist zeal. True to his thesis in Plato Today, which located the totalitarian principle in ancient Athens, he identified the new Germany with Sparta. He was also doing something that ambitious intellectuals have been known to do before and since, which is to say that he was rating the ...”

“... City Council as well as a WEA lecturer. Dalyell records that this author of a much-praised work on Plato pitched his council election campaign on a pledge to get North Oxford’s rubbish bins emptied not twice but three times a week. Would that some ambitious young intellectual in the Crossman mould were launching his political career with a similar pledge in ...”

“... The system we have is predicated on advocacy – that is, on presentation. David Pannick excavates Plato, Cicero and Quintilian for quotations about the deceptive and illusory characteristics of the art. But, as he would agree, the image of the advocate as conjuror is far too simple. In a process which is not single-mindedly devoted to finding the ...”

“... to romanticism and individualism. His avowed indebtedness to the thinkers of ancient Greece, to Plato and Aristotle and the philosophers of his own youth, fell foul of the new cult of originality and the new Hellenism. The founders of modern Classical scholarship repaid their debt to their best informant on post-Aristotelian philosophy, on Roman Republican ...”

“... Fregean, the Kripkean, the Popperian, the Whiteheadian and the Heideggerian will each re-educate Plato in a different way before starting to argue with him,’ Rorty charmingly remarks. But why do we need to canonise dead philosophers at all? ‘I do not think we can get along without canons,’ Rorty replies: This is because we cannot get along without ...”

“... in their minds as well as in the books they carried in their pockets.’ As late as the 1950s, Plato’s Republc was taken out more often from Merthyr’s public library than from any other in Great Britain. For workers like this, Engels had struck an unexpected chord when he argued in Ludwig Feuerbach that the proletariat were the true heirs of the ...”

“... of reality, artists as the most dedicated system-builders become leading citizens: but if, as Plato proposed, the ‘real’ in some sense exists, and artists merely fake it, then there is no place for them in the ideal republic. A number of arguments can be tried to defend the ‘truth’ of what the artist does, but most high-minded claims are out for ...”