“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... arrives at are thus apodictic, rather like the truths of geometry. Such a comfort. Ever since Plato, philosophers have envied geometers their certitudes. So it’s not surprising that the story about philosophy being conceptual analysis was well received all the way from Oxford to Berkeley, with many intermediate stops. Still, there was felt to be trouble ...”

“... tourists take in the Island of Aristotle on the Sea of Cold, and then press on to a town called Plato, which is said to be the perfect commonwealth though it is hard to tell as you would have to spend 14 years in quarantine before being allowed in. Another highlight is the chance to relax with the whimsical Irishry of John Duns Scotus, surrounded as he is ...”

“... 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 ...”