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“... 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 ...”

“... pleasures of Dichtung. (The terms if not the general direction of this discussion have Plato as their patron.) And above all, for writers who urge the claims of Spirit against those of justice, or beneficence, or utility, how can it be possible to be wrong? For within what Heller calls ‘a Hegelian configuration of History’ Spirit is constantly ...”

“... honours in Classics, not so much for neglecting the books as for being contemptuous of Plato. He discovered Swinburne – at that time a writer banned from the University Library – and went mad for him. So mad, really, that he never recovered. When he read Dante he said all the right things (‘pure muscle, nothing superfluous’) but drew no ...”

“... We drove, and arrived in good shape and good humour: only I did spend most of Christmas reading Plato, by way of preparation for the following term, and I didn’t feel inclined to sit up late drinking mine host’s Cognac, which surprised him somewhat. The strange episode of dithering was forgotten: there was no special reason to remember it. The Spring ...”

“... of a new greatness of man, of a new untrodden way to his enhancement.’ We might think here of Plato, who is explicit in his Republic in staging the moment of philosophy, specifically of philosophy’s entrance into the public world, as in some future that is now datable only paradoxically, as when philosophers will become kings; in the meantime we ...”

“... of Stevens must be sensual, or it is nothing.I love a quatrain from Joseph Brodsky’s poem ‘Plato Elaborated’: ‘There would be a café in that city with a quite/decent blancmange, where, if I should ask why/we need the twentieth century, when we already/have the nineteenth, my colleague would stare fixedly at his fork or his knife.’ It was the ...”

“... thought had historically dismissed the significance of slavery: the treatment of slave labour in Plato and Aristotle anticipated the later disregard for other forms of unfree or non-industrial labour – women’s unpaid labour, or that carried out by indentured workers and peasants – in Marxism. Marx and Engels had failed to break with bourgeois ...”

“... with the force of law. The Pythagorean community is said to have banned beans and meat, and Plato had quite definite ideas about how the different classes in the Republic ought to be nourished – the Guardians were supposed to go easy on the ‘sweetmeats’ and the ‘Attic pastry’ – but the only secular modern state that has seriously gone about ...”