“... paradigm of The Anxiety of Influence when I turned the page and read: ‘Yeats wrote that “Plato thought nature but a spume that plays/Against a ghostly paradigm of things.” ’ However, this is probably what Bloom calls a ‘strong misreading’; the swerve from Yeats’s text doesn’t seem to me to help Yeats, but that is not the point. Opinion as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 appreciation of his ...”

“... agreement on the topic of the belief. Your beliefs about God, Clough and Wordsworth – and about Plato and Derrida, for that matter – do not, or at least should not, come with a social price tag. In a properly tolerant democratic society, nobody would worry much about their fellow citizens’ religious, aesthetic or philosophical views. For everybody would ...”

“... of him – and there is some wonderful commentary in this book, particularly on Diaphanéité, Plato and Platonism and Marius – he defines better than anyone else the unique paradox of Pater’s position: that he was antinomial without being oppositional. He found a way of being adversarial that wasn’t merely a relish for conflict. Pater didn’t go ...”

“... logical and persuasive arguments as with the various proofs of the immortality of the soul from Plato on down: we admire them and cannot for the moment quite remember why it is we are not at once persuaded. In Scruton’s case, it is surely the fact of history, whose omission makes the argumentation so flawless. I have to say that I think (rightly or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are moved? These are complex questions which have generated a long tradition of speculation, from Plato to Rousseau and beyond. Much of the credibility of passion depends on context. The theatre is a space set aside for heightened response, and this response is often without consequence; this is why Rousseau thought that art might insulate us from ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”