“... Nothing quite like this had been said since Ramus in the 16th century declared that ‘whatever Aristotle has said is false.’ Few of today’s historians of the 16th century are so engaged, or write with such ideological passion. What we now see is what Elton ostensibly most desired, a history marked by value-free and highly technical excellence, but ...”

“... documents which clearly stated that God was everywhere. Even some garbage from mistranslations of Aristotle that said “Nature abhorred a vacuum” was taken to mean that Nature just fucking wouldn’t allow one at all and that Boyle was an idiot.’ But ‘Sir Robert’ and his mates ignored the Catholics, and that was truly a Good Thing. Kary Mullis on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of magic called catoptromancy made use of them to find lost objects. But mirrors were dangerous: Aristotle said that menstruating women who gazed at them soiled them, and it was argued that ‘any person who looks at himself in the mirror of a whore will resemble her in impudence and bawdiness.’ To this day, people cover mirrors after a death, which was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... took a teaching job at Magdalen College, tutoring on set texts, and later lecturing on Leibniz and Aristotle. He found his way in philosophy only gradually. In 1936 he and Berlin formed a discussion group of young dons that included A.J. Ayer, whose vivid brief for logical positivism in Language, Truth and Logic had made him a celebrity. Austin resisted. In a ...”

“... wild’ Kennedy boys. He wrote an entire book about Jacqueline Kennedy’s marriage to Aristotle Onassis, The $20,000,000 Honeymoon (1970), which the Times dismissed as a ‘piece of garbage’. He died, aged 65, of cancer in February 1981, six years after he’d made his will. Though he left a brother and sister, his obituary – a fourteen-liner ...”

“... marriage alliances (gamountai) with complete freedom, and, it seems, no sexual inhibitions either. Aristotle shows that the Celts acquired a reputation for ‘publicly honouring’ man-to-man coupling (‘society’, ‘intercourse’) almost as soon as they arrived on the pages of history, 650 years before Eusebius. Similar practices are attested for the ...”

“... drew up for himself and distributed among his fellow students. They were to read a chapter from Aristotle’s Logic every day, as well as half an hour of Spinoza; to ‘use words as translations of reality, not as cheap band music’; to listen to Bach and avoid ‘catgut music’; and ‘to be pure of … laziness … pomposity … uncleanliness, bizarre ...”

“... The only problems that [matter] are the moral ones – & there I speak a different language from Aristotle.’ Her own moral, emotional, language was developing as she wrote. Thompson was not irrelevant, her warmth towards him is palpable, but he was as much audience as interlocutor and Conradi’s assertion that she had started to fall in love with him is ...”

“... to the audience casts us as voyeurs and judges. Indeed, what are we there for? According to Aristotle, tragedy was about elite figures, whose terrible fates served to warn us lesser folk, delivered some kind of satisfaction at the spectacle of the mighty fallen, and sobered us up to go back home and give thanks for our uninteresting ...”

“... told me years ago that I must write Milky Way like this: γαλαξίας κύκλος’), to Aristotle in Chalcidice, to her father born in Thessaloniki, to the oldest star (13 billion years old) and back to the stars on her laptop (China, two years old). Γαλαξίας κύκλος means literally a ‘milky circle’. She has come to Almería with ...”

“... her best creative self to an infatuation with sex and money, as embodied in the repellent form of Aristotle Onassis. And Nadia Stancioff doesn’t get much beyond that sort of cliché. Briefly Callas’s secretary, she has written a memoir which follows in the wake of comparable efforts by mother, cousin, husband and sister, all claiming to reveal the true ...”

“... Heilbrun and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have whole entries to themselves and Margaret Doody’s Aristotle Detective is singled out for honourable mention in the entry on Detective Fiction. Luce Irigaray is in, but not Cecil Woodham Smith. The biggest vacancy in the Companion is where contemporary best-selling fiction ought to be. The absence is so ...”