“... a getaway car? Many political thinkers have found themselves exiled by choice or force, including Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Lenin, Berlin, Arendt, Shklar and Machiavelli himself. Cicero was decapitated while trying to hot-foot it from Rome; according to Cassius Dio, his tongue was pulled out and jabbed with ...”

“... worse, they are ‘timid barbarians’ – a reference to the slavish scholastic admiration of Aristotle in Oxford and Cambridge. For the Anglophone reader, the Canzoniere and Trionfi are blueprints for the great outpouring of late Tudor love poetry. But the first English response to Petrarch came in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – begun a decade or so ...”

“... for philosophical truth. Confucianism was ‘transformed into a state ideology’. If we think of Aristotle, the tutor to Alexander, rather than Socrates, say, or Augustine, we have an idea of the way the Confucians situated themselves. Scholars with practical advice to offer could change policy, if they were lucky enough not to be purged, but only at the ...”

“... because, in the act of payback, which has to be mimetic of the original offence, it is what Aristotle said drama was as a whole: an imitation of an action. In his interviews, as in his practice, Walcott was attracted to the art of imitation but criticised what he called mimicry, not the colonial mimicry of the imperial centre that V.S. Naipaul wrote ...”

“... too are mediated, given to us as a story within the story.There is a more serious problem, and Aristotle supplies its formulation: ‘The unity of a plot does not consist, as some suppose, in its having one man as its subject. An infinity of things befall that one man, some of which it is impossible to reduce to unity; and in like manner there are many ...”

“... 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 epistemology and ...”

“... are then discussed: first, an account found in some classical philosophers, particularly in Aristotle, which locates the ethical life, the life of virtue and reason, as central to the development of an individual’s well-being in the fullest sense of that term. Williams offers strong criticism of much of ...”

“... as any legal obligation. Antonio shows his love for Bassanio by staking a pound of flesh. Aristotle declared that ‘all things are common among friends’ and a surprisingly large number of Renaissance humanists agreed. According to Montaigne, friends should share ‘wills, thoughts, judgments, goods, wives, children, honour and lives’. Generosity ...”

“... War because it deflected popular anger away from him.What we do know from Thucydides, Aristotle and Plutarch is that Pericles had instituted strict racial criteria for Athenian citizenship: every citizen had to have two Athens-born parents, which caused trouble for his own immigrant second wife. He had achieved power by having his rivals ...”

“... to Thomas Aquinas, is a vir occasionatus, a defective or mutilated man – this he got from Aristotle, but he used it to explain why Eve was created second, from a crooked bone: she was made to fall. To be fair, Adam also blames God a little: ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’ Adam acts like a ...”

“... he saw it as an ancient discipline defined by an established canon of texts running from Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Heidegger and Levinas; and his aim as a teacher was to get his students to love the classics. On occasion he would offer useful summaries, saying for example that Levinas saw time not as ‘a succession of instants … but the response to ...”

“... differently from masters, but they looked disturbingly similar. One neat solution was provided by Aristotle, who claimed that some people are slaves because they have slavish souls. But in time of war, it might become awkwardly obvious that enslavement could happen to anybody. Plautus’ play The Captives seems to deal with precisely this issue: a master ...”

“... is BAD.’ Classical thinkers would have tended to agree, if not on quite the same grounds. Aristotle thought that the life of tradesmen and mechanics was ‘ignoble and inimical to virtue’. He rather approved of the way that Thebes disqualified business types from public office until they had been retired for ten years. In The Laws, Plato deplores ...”

“... from ancient speeches and handbooks. Our own terms of rhetorical analysis go back directly to Aristotle and Cicero (it’s common to point out that Barack Obama, or his speech writers, have learned their best tricks from Cicero). And so far as the House of Commons is concerned, those 19th-century gentlemen who devised, or enshrined, most of the ...”

“... proposal must be grasped. In a sense the philosophical revision I am describing was always, after Aristotle, the deeper conviction of the aesthetic. Shklovsky himself always implied a kind of convergence between signified and referent: the fabula – the mythic raw materials – was in that sense both all at once and constituted the facts, so to speak, but ...”