“... he came upon books by Maritain in the English Faculty Library, and was thus enabled to see why Aristotle was ‘the soundest basis for Christian doctrine’. At this time, about 1935, he was moving sedately towards the Church, and also rehearsing his Canadian version of agrarianism. And although he regarded his mind as nothing out of the ordinary, he began ...”

“... human beings would wish only to live up to one another, in the sense in which Galileo lived up to Aristotle, Blake to Milton, Dalton to Lucretius and Nietzsche to Socrates. The relationship between predecessor and successor would be conceived, as Gianni Vattimo has emphasised, not as the power-laden relation of ‘overcoming’ (Überwindung) but as the ...”

“... If ‘plot’ takes precedence over ‘character’ – as it does for a long line of critics from Aristotle to the present-day formalists – there is more involved than a matter of elective technique or emphasis. Iago’s plotting of Othello’s downfall is seen by Josipovici as a highly suggestive metaphor, an instance of devilish contrivance somehow in ...”

“... of fiction. The difficulty here was pointed out over two millennia ago. In the Poetics Aristotle drew attention to the fact that impossibilities are frequent in fiction. But, he argued, there is no reason to complain about a ‘probable impossibility’, which is always preferable to an ‘improbable possibility’. (Consider the many difficulties ...”

“... them, and the chorus intones: Time Is all gone for the Greeks now … I wonder if Plato and Aristotle in all their wisdom foresaw Greece ending in these far-off Mountains, in this freezing night. Beyond the Mountains showed the extraordinary ability to absorb and adapt the qualities of alien forms that served Rexroth so well in his translations: the ...”

“... that during this period Russell displayed a sharper mind than any philosopher in human history, Aristotle included. That continuous brilliance came at a price: Russell said he thought afterwards that the prolonged effort of concentration had unfitted him for absolutely first-class philosophical work thereafter. From time to time these letters talk of ...”

“... Voltaire, Frederick (the Great), Kant, Catherine (the Great), Plato, Alexander (the Great), Aristotle, Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Constantine, ‘the Anarchs old’ – before describing ‘how and by what paths I have been brought/To this dread pass’.One spring morning, Rousseau found himself ‘asleep/Under a mountain’ beside a ‘gentle ...”

“... that Bayley’s criticism shares all the important Murdochian postulates, in her case derived from Aristotle and Kant, about artistic selflessness, generosity to free and uncontrolled characters, attentiveness and the like: but where she is prescriptive, he is evasive; where she is intellectual and philosophical, he methodically returns ideas to the novelistic ...”

“... of tomatoes she grows. After Kennedy’s assassination and the death of her second husband, Aristotle Onassis, Jackie turned again to France. As an editor at Doubleday, she looked after Secrets of Marie Antoinette in 1985, The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier in 1991 and Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper’s Paris after the Liberation, the last book ...”

“... Financial innovations were involved in the development of these vessels, as Khalili explains. Aristotle Onassis, one of the driving forces behind the gargantuanisation of ships, would begin by chartering a new ship to an oil company that needed transportation capacity but preferred not to own the assets involved, since it saw itself as being in the oil ...”

“... by now well over fifty of them, covering a staggering range of figures and topics: Thucydides, Aristotle, Lucian, Quintilian, Origen, St Augustine, Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of ...”

“... He really is, to all intents and purposes, an unpolitical man. Unlike Hobbes or Plato or Aristotle (Gay compares him to all three), Freud shows no informed interest in social institutions. His observations on the danger of ‘the psychological misery of the masses’, which, Freud claims, leads to the ‘identification of the members’ of those ...”

“... true? Haydon claims to have got his story from Talfourd, but that proves nothing. Eye-witnesses (Aristotle observed) are inclined to embroider upon good stories, to divert the audience – that is how history and the art of fiction originated – and Talfourd or Haydon might well have inserted those ‘Sirs’ to indicate Hazlitt’s resemblance, when he was ...”

“... in magic, science has always had its public. There have been scientific books since, let’s say, Aristotle. But the scientific journal was something new. Who were Oldenburg’s readers, and what were they after? It may be that one should think of them as akin to present-day readers of New Scientist: practical people, with a bent for observation, or full of ...”

“... and more foule thanne any beest of the erthe,’ which is more like a misquotation of something Aristotle said in the Politics than a misquotation of Homer. In 1500, the great gatherer of words Desiderius Erasmus produced a collection of Adagia, which swelled in successive editions to include more than four thousand sayings and proverbs (‘war is sweet to ...”