“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by her older brother, André, a mathematical genius who at the age of twelve was reading Plato in Greek.As a toddler Weil developed an extreme fear of germs and couldn’t stand to be touched. She was also preternaturally clumsy. At school, she couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with the others. She suffered from phobias, a sense of disgust ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... business types from public office until they had been retired for ten years. In The Laws, Plato deplores people living near harbours: ‘Although there is sweetness in proximity for the uses of daily life; for by filling the markets of the city with foreign merchandise and retail trading, and by breeding in men’s souls knavish and tricky ways, it ...”

“... gay, all attractive in a slender, ambiguous way, a bit like the willowy ephebes gathered around Plato in the painting by Théodore Chassériau in the Museé d’Orsay. I hasten to add that these boys were the exact opposite of the men Foucault felt attracted to. Since his ephebes were neither intellectuals nor objects of desire but artists, they suited his ...”

“... the boundaries of human experience. There were exceptions, however: especially, there was Plato with his bold view of the Good as a real transcendent form, not a mere thought or poem or dream. Plato’s sovereign Good was neither subject nor object: it belonged to the realm of the il y a – the ‘there is’ or ...”

“... to Homer, Sappho is believed to have lived on the Greek island of Lesbos some time around 600 BC. Plato and Aristophanes mention her; in ancient Rome, Horace and Catullus wrote famous imitations of her verses. Some six hundred years after her death, her renown was such that there was an attempt at a collected edition of her songs: a group of Greek scholars at ...”