“... 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 ...”

“... theory and practice. The heteroclite ruminations collected in Fait et à faire take him by way of Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant and Merleau-Ponty, to Freud; the subjects dealt with include the subconscious, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, phenomenology, more on ‘the social instituting imaginary’ first broached in Imaginary Institution, and autonomy as a ...”

“... famous courtesans showed a distinct preference for sporty types, especially Olympic athletes, and Aristotle claimed that to accuse an ugly man of adultery was like charging an invalid with assault. All this led the French classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant to conclude that the Greek body was best seen, not as a lump of meat, temporarily animated by the soul, but ...”

“... Greek melos means ‘song’), and roughly distinguish sung poems from epic and tragedy. Aristotle, who had a strong preference for narrative forms, more or less shrugs off this type of poetry. If he had made a few more observations about lyric then Western thinking on the subject might have been less of a muddle than it was to become. The word ...”

“... to be taught in the Schools, to supplant Aristotelianism, and to become himself ‘the new Aristotle’, building a new all-embracing philosophical system, with a new metaphysics and a new method that could deliver all the mechanical, medical and moral goods that Aristotelian philosophy purported to supply but spectacularly failed to. That was not an ...”

“... in moderation. That would ensure health and longevity, and that was all one should care about. Aristotle specifically looked down his nose at cooks. Knowing how to cook was the sort of instrumental knowledge suitable for a slave. If you were going to live the life of virtue, you needed the right number and sort of slaves, but the idea that you would learn ...”

“... time one has reached the remarkable expiration, like a dying breath, with which the book closes. Aristotle recommends, in his Rhetoric, that the best way out of a stylistic bind is publicly to correct oneself, and it may at first seem that this is all Coetzee is up to. Thus, at various moments, he has Costello think to herself that argument is ‘not her ...”

“... beer, returning to tipple throughout the day with no ill effects. (Unlike parrots, which as Aristotle knew, have no head for alcohol: in Australia, where they binge on over-ripe pears, birdwatchers have seen them getting legless, Amy Winehouse-style, faltering on branches and plummeting from trees.) For a long time no one in avian taxonomy knew where to ...”

“... bunch with links to Arab circles, and Frederick himself had a reputation for being fond of Aristotle and of the dissolute life. At the Council of Lyon in 1245, the papal representative called Frederick a ‘new Lucifer’. A book that exists only as a rumour can have as many authors as required, and the charge of being the originator or disseminator of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... so now in bringing his thoughts together in what he describes as his ‘philosophy of society’. Aristotle, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Habermas, Bourdieu and Foucault are all dismissed in a sentence here, Locke in a footnote. They all took it for granted that we are language-speaking animals, and were then ‘off and running with an account of society, social ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he also points out that classical political theory had a direct impact outside the European world. Aristotle enjoyed a high profile across Asia from the 17th century onwards, translations of his works contributing to Ottoman ideals of good governance, Chinese reform movements and even anti-colonial sentiment in the greater Islamic world from Arabia to ...”

“... and often for no very good reason, Wittgenstein, Auster, Nabokov, Barnes, McEwan, Spinoza, Amis, Aristotle, Zeno, Shakespeare, Pasternak, Banville, Dostoevsky, Frost, Cervantes, Updike, Beckett, Chekhov (and others) make guest appearances with paraphrased words of wisdom, or just words. Erdal does not wear her reading lightly. She has a penchant for the ...”