“... envisaged it, ‘a kind of comedy. Mediterranean brightness and frivolity; Aristophanes hooting Plato off the stage’. This is a strange, slightly convoluted argument (note the none too dainty pirouette on the word ‘outside’, for example), yet in many ways it is very persuasive. In 1923, Picasso was spouting Nietzscheanisms like ‘art is a lie ...”

“... or frivolity of any kind. The boy started Greek at the age of three, and was soon studying Plato’s dialogues in the original, along with arithmetic and ancient history, before moving on to Latin and logic and spending a year in Montpellier as a student of natural science. By that time he had started calling himself a utilitarian – apparently the ...”

“... myth. Carson’s first book, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), was a playful study in prose of Sappho, Plato, the limitless nature of desire and the origin of the alphabet. The essay – capaciously understood – is a form still important to her, and most of her more recent books have included prose essays with topics or jumping-off points from the classics: Men ...”

“... fantasies of human goodness and curiosity. Abandoned by his brother and envious of his ‘playing Plato to Johnson’s Socrates’ in order ‘not merely to write a true romance but to live it as well’, John plots murderous revenge. The figure of John dramatises a long history of competitive Johnsonian devotion. Boswell won the war of the biographers that ...”

“... the series his book appears in. After boiling down the history of literary theory since Plato to ‘a sketchy sketch map’, he declares with naive circularity that it shows little variation. The contending forces within MLA-style Theory are summarised with equal breeziness, and little effort is made to unpack the paradoxes. Cunningham ...”

“... to the understanding of natural phenomena, which was pioneered by the Pythagoreans and by Plato, and culminated in the astronomical model proposed by Eudoxus of Cnidus (408-355 BC), who suggested that the complex paths of the celestial bodies – including the planets’ apparent retrograde motion at one point in their cycle – could be explained by ...”

“... to England and Ireland, and then to Switzerland on his honeymoon (he spent most of it reading Plato, Machiavelli and Montesquieu). Each experience had left him convinced that the Old World was slowly conforming to the American model. As a result, he felt emboldened to discuss democracy in universal, categorical terms. He described his approach in the ...”

“... did. The issues between us, Leibniz said of Locke, are matters of some importance; he referred to Plato the good guy and Aristotle, not so good. Many of the nature/nurture arguments seem also to recapitulate the scholastic Christian and Muslim problem of determinism/freedom. Cognition v. culture is where we have got to after debates in the West spanning ...”

“... aristocrat). 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 ...”

“... with a prophetical peroration.’ Classical Utopianism is relegated to the mythological exordium. Plato and Plutarch make their appearance, then, in distinctly odd company and not in a manner which makes quite perspicuous the degree to which they set the intellectual pattern of so many subsequent Utopias. ‘The birth of Utopia’ is delayed until the ...”

“... is simply the equivalent of an aid to memory. This view, as Culler reminds us, goes back as far as Plato’s Phaedrus, but it again harbours the doctrine of meaning as presence (spoken meaning anyway) and has to be deconstructed. Derrida ‘upsets’ Saussure and Plato by suggesting that ‘speech may not be independent of ...”

“... the whole potentiality of the genre. It has been said that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.’ Certainly Cervantes’s influence on the novel, and on novelists, has been incalculable. He has always been a writer’s writer. Only Kingsley Amis, I believe, has been ...”

“... if one concurs with Peacock’s description of good intellectual relations. ‘The dialogues of Plato and Cicero are made up of discussions amongst persons who differed in opinion.’ They would not ‘have been content to pass eternity in the company of persons who merely thought as they did’. In Britain, however, the name of Leavis resounds with greater ...”

“... rulers on those whom it cannot itself rule. The contrast with European polities is striking. For Plato, as for Marx, government is the consequence of social stratification, arising from the division of labour. Rulers are members of a dominant class, recruited from a professional caste of warriors who control the countryside (feudalists) or from the upper ...”

“... in a rudimentary form in Homer’s ‘people-devouring king’ (demoboros basileus), more fully in Plato, and later still in the dialogue between early Christians and their persecutors, where it partly revolved around the issue of Eucharistic practices. When Montaigne described the belligerents in the French religious wars as more cannibal than ...”