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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The only problems that [matter] are the moral ones – & there I speak a different language from Aristotle.’ Her own moral, emotional, language was developing as she wrote. Thompson was not irrelevant, her warmth towards him is palpable, but he was as much audience as interlocutor and Conradi’s assertion that she had started to fall in love with him is ...”

“... told me years ago that I must write Milky Way like this: γαλαξίας κύκλος’), to Aristotle in Chalcidice, to her father born in Thessaloniki, to the oldest star (13 billion years old) and back to the stars on her laptop (China, two years old). Γαλαξίας κύκλος means literally a ‘milky circle’. She has come to Almería with ...”

“... the size of Guha’s doorstop. After training in Hellenistic philosophy and the interpretation of Aristotle, Nussbaum has begun in recent years to write far more widely on issues of development, feminism and public affairs. Her interest in India stems from personal dealings over two decades with a number of prominent Indians (especially the family of Kshiti ...”