“... 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 ...”

“... in this respect. Dr Johnson, Josipovici writes with considerable persuasiveness, was more like Aristotle than Coleridge in his treatment of Shakespeare’s characters. He did not seek to see himself in the character of Lear, but saw the play as ‘a mythos, a pattern of events, whose changes of fortune grip us’. For Johnson, ‘the innermost recesses of ...”

“... uncertainties true to the complexity of the moral life. Or perhaps the right thing to say, with Aristotle, is that one should not demand from the philosophical treatment of a subject more certainty than the subject admits. Scanlon’s method is highly controversial, and so is its application to specific questions. It requires not just the plugging in of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with medieval apocalypse than with ... Aristotle,’ and he writes some remarkable pages on these terrible ends and images of ends: The millennial ending of Macbeth, the broken apocalypse of Lear, are false endings, human periods in an eternal world. They are researches into death in an age too late ...”

“... techniques of modern colour photography and the splendour of colour reproductions. Is this not, as Aristotle might have wondered, a ‘peculiar pleasure’ of a different type from what engages us in the experience of the architectonic? Does it not feed, extra-aesthetically, into the social tendencies and temptations of a new ‘society of the image’ in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”