“... 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 ...”

“... Harrington’s Oceana. The leading works produced by the second period were Henry Neville’s Plato Redivivus and Algernon Sidney’s Discourses concerning Government. Collectively, these writers are normally described as ‘republicans’. Skinner dispenses with that term, on the ground that the principal writers of the second wave, Neville and ...”

“... again. While interned, he read Goethe, Winckelmann, Schiller, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle and Freud – which shows that the redemptive power of literature has its limits, because he emerged utterly unrepentant. He told the Sunday Pictorial that he had not changed his ideas one inch. ‘I do not retract anything that I have either ...”

“... philosopher for today’s world replied Karl Marx – he was easily the winner, ahead of Hume, Plato, Karl Popper and others. Asked to comment, Eric Hobsbawm said he thought that the fall of Soviet Communism had at last allowed people to disentangle Marxism from Moscow. Francis Wheen, the author of a recent biography of Marx, made a similar point. The man ...”

“... postgraduate students, spoke to them ‘for hours … of Hellas and Hellenism, of Pythagoras and Plato … of Empedocles and Heraclitus, of Homer and Thucydides, of Aeschylus and Theocritus’. The young couple were in their element. H.D. had recently published ‘Sitalkis’, a Greek-accented work that reads like a love poem to Aldington and was (she ...”

“... us care for and about others. The opposite case, made by Susan Moeller – and by Rousseau and Plato before her – in Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (1999), a book that is only briefly noted here, is that excessive exposure to images of pain and suffering can inoculate us against what the authors here call ‘strong ...”

“... first employs this formula, he uses it to refer to the thought – equally familiar to students of Plato and of Freud – that the obstacles to your capacity to act freely may be internal rather than external, and that you will need to free yourself from these psychological constraints if you are to behave autonomously. But this, too, fails to capture a ...”

“... and through his favourite writers: Plutarch, Seneca, Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, Catullus, Cicero, Plato, Aristotle. The Essays are woven through with quotations, around which Montaigne meditates. Sometimes a single passage will prompt a lengthy reflection; sometimes Montaigne collects quotations around a theme like entries in a commonplace book. Old and ...”

“... shy about comparing his favourite painters with the mightiest philosophers – Cézanne with Plato and Kant, Picasso with Nietzsche, Pollock with Hegel – if that is what it takes to make the art count. He understands that such analogies may embarrass other art historians, but believes that such embarrassment often ‘functions as an alibi … for not ...”

“... seems to me one of his most impressive rhetorical moves’. Other models are said to be Plato, Montaigne and Adorno. In fact, most of the individual essays seem organised in traditionally-structured ways, as academic exercises in precisely the format which is disavowed in the book as a whole. McGann’s mission to re-establish the ...”

“... textual strategies; and he also provides a mini-history of the fortunes of rhetoric from Plato to the ...”