“... 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 ...”

“... Dante is a hedgehog, Shakespeare is a fox and various other figures fall easily into place: ‘Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.’ The distinction was fragile and questionable – if ...”

“... communication’ with assorted spirits including various deceased friends, Auden, Plato and a peacock called Mirabell, all of it recorded with the help of Merrill’s longtime partner, David Jackson, during twenty years of séances using a Ouija board at their home in Stonington, Connecticut. This volume tips in at 560 pages. Merrill also ...”

“... 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 ...”

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

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in 1936, McLachlan hung a map of Spain in the classroom. In divinity classes he taught the boys Plato and Voltaire. The ethos of the public schools, Winchester especially, was conducive to these early Communist stirrings. School life may have been led in a fug of petty hierarchies and coteries, ostracism and ingratiation, but it was essentially ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... we call hospitality’; and when he turns his attention to philosophy, he gets the same result. Plato’s Sophist opens, Derrida notes, with Socrates extending his welcome to a character known only as ‘the Stranger’ (Xenos). (‘Is he not rather a God,’ Socrates asks, ‘come to us in the guise of a stranger?’) But the Stranger is not an easy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Columbia undergraduates up the street, who read W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk in the Plato-to-Arendt ‘great books’ course mandatory for all sophomores, have probably never heard of the man who was, in the 1930s, one of Du Bois’s crucial collaborators as well as one of his sharpest critics.Scholars have been only marginally more ...”