“... species has essential, unalterable characteristics, which can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle. The mysteries were, first, over what it is about life that distinguishes it from death, and second, the process by which a fully developed organism, be it chicken or human, emerges from a fertilised egg. The first mystery was solved, tautologically, by ...”

“... in the brain, the heart was responsible for feeling and desire, for it was there, according to Aristotle, that the sentient soul dwelled. Likened to a glowing sun, the heart flooded the body with vital heat. Although the full circulatory system was only discovered in the 17th century, physicians were aware that the heart pumped blood outward to all the ...”

“... to Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus as they wrestle with the form/matter opposition inherited from Aristotle and riddle out where to place Christ’s body in such a scheme. Whether or not the corpse is a nonperson, it resembles a human being, at least for a time, and must be disposed of before that resemblance collapses. This status as ‘semblant body’ is 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that the qualitative method of restricting power according to its ends, which came originally from Aristotle, led nowhere. Until the date when people learnt that lesson, Dr Sommerville’s methods of classification are anachronistic and liable to mislead. They also do nothing to explain choices of allegiance in the Civil War. Sir Francis Seymour, as Dr ...”

“... scholar produced anything comparable to Grote’s history of Greece and his work on Plato and Aristotle. Although Classical education flourished in the public schools and in the ancient universities, critical scholarship had little part in it. Teachers in these institutions were far more interested in translation from English into the Ancient ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... patrons of his scientific and other plans for making money. They could play Alexander to his Aristotle: the arrogant comparison was one of his own. He had plans to exploit his knowledge of chemistry, to teach logic by mail order, to turn manufacturer even. The most fetching prospectus was one to make his home into ‘a sort of Casino for fashionable ...”

“... or beautiful young mother.) Classical medical theory supported the value of wet-nursing – Aristotle had thought the thin watery milk of the new mother was bad for babies. Husbands also found it more convenient to have their wives give the children to another to nurse; sexual intercourse was believed to sour a nursing woman’s milk and endanger the ...”

“... from the cut of a coat, a walk, a mannerism? This is possible, though not very plausible; and Aristotle tells us that a plausible impossibility is better than an implausible possibility. Then perhaps we might prefer to guess that here is the work of some enemy, an embittered rival driven by motives yet to be revealed, bent on discrediting and ruining the ...”

“... for poetry as well, wanting it to digest and advance all culture, the works of Marx and Freud, Aristotle and Beethoven. (These four, plus a mysterious unknown fifth who was probably originally Kant, are the ghosts with whom he exchanges thoughts on a production of Coriolanus in his long poem of that name.) Schwartz had absolute faith in the tenets of high ...”