“... could come up with principles of justice, and then imagine acting on them, perhaps in some utopia. Plato, whose thoughts about justice have often been read in this way, imagines Dike¯ , the personified figure of Justice in the Laws, tagging along behind the Almighty and meting out condign punishment to malefactors. In similar vein, the late G.A. Cohen argued ...”

“... subject comes from philosophically sophisticated but honourably ignorant juniors.’ There was Plato, for instance; and Eliot and Larkin, who unlike Helen Small, were not asking but projecting. Kermode is writing from experience, of course, but not immediately about his experience, and what he now has to say about final prospects is not very different from ...”

“... evil, and then denies that the acts are evil, precisely because they are idealistic. Thus Plato argues in the Meno and elsewhere that wrongdoing can occur only in ignorance. The best of the arguments says that whatever you want to pursue, you see as being good; so you cannot knowingly want to pursue what you see as bad. As it’s a fact of common ...”

“... of duty, his efforts make for stale, sour reading. The usual suspects are named: authoritarian Plato; ‘a man of the first century AD named Saul’ who ‘hailed from Tarsus’ (what age group is this pitched at?); the ‘wily’ Emperor Constantine; and Augustine and Aquinas, with ‘their obsessed, twisted minds’. At last, after the benighted Middle ...”

“... could be treated as a metaphysician rather than a poet. He might have borrowed a few phrases from Plato and the English moralists, but he had never engaged in anything like the virtuosic logical reasoning practised by Leibniz. Pope was a poet – not just a versifier, but an inventor and entertainer – and he presented his readers with an elegant dance of ...”

“... for the week beginning 21 October 1940, for instance, included Dr Unger on ‘Greek Philosophy: Plato (continued)’, Mr Stadler on ‘History of Medieval Culture (continued)’, and Professor Marx, ‘Study Group on Goethe’. The exiled journalist Rudolf Olden was also interned there, and ‘in the exceptionally fine summer of 1940’ delivered ...”

“... Friendship Society whom he hadn’t offended. Like the speaker in Joseph Brodsky’s poem ‘Plato Elaborated’, here was someone to throw the book at: And when they would finally arrest me for espionage, for subversive activity, vagrancy, for ménage à trois ... It was Brodsky again who archly pointed out that ‘a translation, by definition, lags ...”

“... study the Kabbala and Koran, and mixed what he learned there with whatever he gleaned from reading Plato and the Latin poets in the original languages. The resulting syncretic brew was definitely a minority taste among readers, but Herder soon developed it and became an arms-length disciple. It was through Herder that Goethe came to know of him, and eventually ...”

“... this 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 ...”

“... fuse of history’s teleo: Arise and repossess The surplus value of your swindled consciousness! Plato thought nature plagiarises spirit: Being determines consciousness determined Marx: But in the contradictions of the Way The human dialectic osculates and arcs And quarrels to insert Some transient motive in the motiveless inert. By getting right the proper ...”

“... as a motto for his book. In 1944 he wrote to Drury that he was reading the Theaetetus: ‘Plato in this dialogue is occupied with the same problems that I am writing about.’ In 1948 Drury was reading the Parmenides and said he couldn’t make head or tail of it. Wittgenstein: ‘That dialogue seems to me among the most profound of ...”

“... one’s initial questions, the less sure one is of knowing what counts as a good question. Reading Plato or Kant or Hegel in search of help for answers to antecedently formulated questions is not a profitable use of their work. Such thinkers, read in this way, can easily wind up sounding as silly as Nozick makes Hegel when he says ‘Hegel’s theory leaves us ...”

“... or Cambridge 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 ...”

“... ignoble as ungoverned glands’, which is so Audenesque that it actually anticipates ‘No, Plato, No’ in Thank You, Fog, in which Auden writes of the futility of giving ‘orders’ to his ‘ductless glands’. Though he is sometimes admired as a socially observant, even mordant poet of 1960s London, with its ‘jeans and bums and sweaters of the ...”

“... 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 shadow of his former self. Still, you can see ...”