“... 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 ...”

“... and tones in different eras. In the 17th century some scientists wanted to get rid not only of Aristotle but of natural languages as modes of recording natural observations: at the same time, critics were keen to purge poetry of falsities and opacities, epic machinery and ‘strong lines’. The response of Swift was to ridicule the scientists and also the ...”

“... biography: that his massive two volumes entitled Political Philosophy took their place with Plato, Aristotle and Montesquieu in the syllabus for the paper in ‘History and Political Philosophy’ which formed part of the Cambridge Moral Sciences Tripos from 1860 to 1867! There is nevertheless an important intellectual dimension which certainly forms part of ...”

“... Some critics decided that the art of telling stories with a beginning, middle and end – as Aristotle demanded – was archaic, a primitive form of fiction. I heard similar degrading opinions about the value of folklore in the literature of our times. I was living in a civilisation which despised the old and worshipped the young. But somehow I never ...”

“... are ‘male’, ‘rational’, ‘conscious’, ‘thinking’, ‘waking’, ‘extravert’, ‘Aristotle’, ‘Olympian’, ‘Apollo’. The hurrah words are ‘female’, ‘animal’, ‘unconscious’, ‘feeling’, ‘dream’, introvert’, ‘Plato’, ‘chthonic’, ‘Dionysus’. As often, Plato finds himself in strange company; and, of the ...”

“... of power should be justified, which formed the context for the production of Plato’s and Aristotle’s works on political theory – the subject of the challenging work by E. M. and N. Wood which appeared in 1978: Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory. So we ought to know what to expect from a book called The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek ...”

“... as it finds it’: but then it is ‘adorned according to its virtues’. As Hesiod said – and Aristotle, Plato, Sophocles, Plutarch, Lucian, Ausonius and so on also – ‘Well begun is half ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... way he goes about trying to capture a phenomenon so complex and ineffable. There are readings from Aristotle and Freud and Diderot and Tocqueville. There are stories from Sennett’s youth, when he was growing up with his Communist mother in the housing projects of Cabrini Green in Chicago. There are stories from his maturity, as a ‘solid bourgeois’ who ...”

“... touchingly politically incorrect, it’s also slightly bonkers: the dad we are told represents Aristotle (common good, balance), the mum Plato (ideal types, purity), and it’s the mum (in the form of all those Oxford-educated public schoolboys from Tony Crosland to Tony Blair) who has been meting out the punishment in recent decades, leaving the dad a ...”

“... groan, keep quiet, have supper and forget’ – and offers a brilliant aphorism of her own: ‘If Aristotle provided a good definition of man in calling him a “political animal”, the French are not men, they are artists.’ Of course this climate had its effect on the case – mainly that of slowing everything down. In September 1905 – six years after ...”

“... that he had ‘entirely changed his opinion’ after finding a version of her point in Aristotle. The female members of the Cry, meanwhile, are suspicious and envious in equal measure. They mutter bitterly about ‘wits, women of sense, pretenders to penetration, &c.’, insist that ‘learning ever was, and ever would be, the ruin of all women who ...”

“... the same token it is hard to resist some qualms at the inclusion of Homer. The omission as yet of Aristotle and Plato (as indeed of Mahomet) is no doubt purely temporary. But, on any reading of the concept of authority, it is a little surprising to find Godwin and Herzen figuring in the initial list of Masters. Here perhaps the editor’s well-founded ...”

“... from Greece thoughtfully strokes his beard, and answers: ‘All A is B, but all B is not A.’ Aristotle did not live for nothing. All Walt is Pan, but all Pan is not Walt. This, even to Whitman, is incontrovertible. So the new American pantheism collapses. Lawrence can be made to ‘announce’ or ‘declare’ crudities only by someone deaf to the ...”