“... to come Southey would follow the curriculum of his generation. From the republican doctrines of Plato and Milton, he graduated to the rational reformism of Godwin’s Political Justice, a tract of history, theory and moral science that proved the determinism of all thought and action. Since rational change had to be non-violent and could take place only in ...”

“... of naked Celts marching on their city ‘panicked’ the Romans (the historian uses the same word Plato used to describe the impact of Charmides) in 225 BCE. They were an impressive sight, magnificent bodies, at the peak of condition. But when the Roman javelins began to fall, the Celts began to wish they had kept their trousers on. Their shields were too ...”

“... focused but informed by a broad familiarity with the whole tradition of aesthetic commentary from Plato to the present day – a culture he wears lightly but uses to good effect. Parrinder’s attack on ‘the failure of theory’ is also supported by a clear sense of a desirable alternative to the present dispensation. One of his models is Raymond ...”

“... there is also an older, rationalist, tradition of theorising about the mind; one that runs from Plato through Gall, Kant and the faculty psychologists, to Freud and Chomsky. It, too, has its proprietary metaphors, which are frequently architectural. The mind is like a building (Steven Mithen thinks it’s like a cathedral). Entrance and egress are variously ...”

“... taking these into account is the hallmark of all strictly political thinking.’ Thus ever since Plato ridiculed the role of mere doxa, or unsubstantiated and contingent opinions, in political life, defenders of the truth have portrayed politics as the realm of expediency, compromise, hypocrisy, manipulation and mere appearances. Whether in the form of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is a work of art – I rank it right up there with the dialogues composed by Hume or Berkeley or Plato. He made us see a theorem, a mathematical fact, coming into being before our eyes. In the text, several students and their teacher gradually evolve conjectures, counter-examples and lemmas. The footnotes chime in with the historical incidents that underlie ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... claim. The idea of a spherical globe had been dreamed up by the Pythagoreans and taken over by Plato and Aristotle, but (not surprisingly) more as a theory of perfect form than as a physical concept based on observation. (Aristotle noticed that new stars appeared and old ones vanished as one travelled north or south; but had he never asked himself why ...”

“... until they were all swept away by Solzhenitsyn.I like to quote Joseph Brodsky’s lines from ‘Plato Elaborated’: ‘There would be a café in that city with a quite/decent blancmange, where, if I should ask why/we need the 20th century, when we already/have the 19th, my colleague would stare fixedly at his fork or his knife.’ Even as the 21st ...”

“... theory of the elements first expounded by Empedocles in the fifth century bc and later taken up by Plato and Aristotle. Empedocles proposed that all matter is constituted by the four elements of earth, air, fire and water, and that these elements are not immutable: solid substances could be melted to flow like water, while water could be frozen ...”

“... political upheaval, died on 21 June 1527, entertained by the possibility of meeting Seneca and Plato, both pagans, in hell. ‘The worst that can happen to you is that you’ll die and go to hell,’ he wrote in La Mandragola. ‘But how many others have died! And in hell how many worthy men there are!’Machiavelli’s​ contemporaries knew him as a ...”

“... moralising history of the modern world written by its early winners – the many Plato-to-Nato accounts of the global flowering of democracy, liberal capitalism and human rights – has long been in need of drastic revision. At the very least, it must incorporate the experiences of late-developing nations: their fraught and often tragic ...”

“... love that powered England’s great heroes, Nelson and Wellington, and they were not radicals). Plato remarks in the Republic that the great liberator is also the great enslaver: and this was the hard political text learned by Romantic poets through most of Coleridge’s lifetime. Yet probably political defeat disheartened him less than the condition of his ...”