“... 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 ...”

“... the family norm. In matters of academic politics, Descartes ‘was just one peculiar nut’, but Plato hasn’t got much company in thinking that philosophers make good politicians. His deference to Christina – comparing her to God – was ‘disgusting’, but ‘that’s the way you wrote to a queen in the 17th century’. He never enjoyed a normal ...”

“... together its pieces in partial and passionate fashion. Gaddis derives some of his own pieces from Plato, Nietzsche, Freud, Norbert Weiner, Benjamin and Huizinga (the last two take part in a hilarious dialogue in Agapē Agape), but others not cited also come to mind: Sigfried Giedion in Mechanisation Takes Command, Lewis Mumford in Technics and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... impudence and naivety. Perhaps we could say that abstract art had always been parody – parody Plato, parody Monet or Moreau, parody Songs without Words – and what Richter did was return and return to the fact, as puzzle and instigation. ‘Cage (4)’ (2006) The show has many other aspects. I have said nothing, for example, of the mostly small or ...”

“... of its elements, which sometimes conform to the golden ratio celebrated by Pythagoras and Plato, she discovers Philip’s interest – slenderly attested in ancient sources – in the writings and thought of those philosophers. It remains to be seen whether Kottaridi’s redating of the Aegae palace will stand up to scrutiny, but her determination to ...”

“... historical continuum. He emphasises the dynamics of this mutual exchange, and reminds us that Plato warns, in the Charmides, that ‘gnothi seauton’ (‘know thyself’) is not enough if one is simply gazing at oneself in the mirror: such knowledge can be gained only in the complexity of social interaction. There are too many equations in Hirst’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... adds in the ‘Third Anniversary Discourse’) the ‘sublime theories’ that ‘Pythagoras and Plato derived … from the same fountain with the sages of India’. This valorisation of Sanskrit and Indian culture more generally contrasts starkly with the dismissiveness of the 19th century, when for Macaulay ‘a single shelf of a good European library was ...”

“... hanker to swap the canned freedom of suburban Tupperware parties for fantasies of frottage beyond. Plato sums up the affective ping-pong in the Republic in the tale of Leontion, who is morbidly drawn to gaze on the rotting corpses of executed felons outside the Athenian walls, but is also indignant at himself for indulging this urge. The ejection of alien or ...”

“... logic underpinning totalitarianism: the collectivist, anti-rationalist and historicist ideas of Plato, Hegel and Marx. He claimed that they put tradition before reason and the collective before the individual, and that they believed in laws of history which could explain the past and predict the future. Popper saw this as dangerous nonsense. Grand theories ...”

“... For them, the mirror of Dionysus was the material world itself. Proclus suggested that when Plato stated that the surface of the world was created smooth, he meant that it had a reflective surface like a mirror, and Plotinus had something similar in mind when he claimed that it was when the souls saw their images in ‘the mirror of Dionysus’ that ...”

“... contexts, because he helped the early Christians to figure out how to put the Old Testament and Plato together. Physis had not yet settled down to anything like what we call physics, although that was one way it was going. Aristotle’s book called Physics is discernibly on that road. But as long as Nature was not only a dame but also a goddess, her secrets ...”

“... 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 ...”