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“... 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 ...”

“... have been often given, we can reject such views.Consider next a quite different view. According to Plato, Plotinus and others, the Universe exists because its existence is good. Even if we are confident that we should reject this view, it is worth asking whether it makes sense. If it does, that may suggest other possibilities.This Axiarchic View can take a ...”

“... for our times.’ ‘Ubik is true,’ Dick told Williams, ‘and we’re in a sort of cave, like Plato said, and they’re showing us endless funky films.’ The funky parts of modern life – films, pills, joints, urban confusion, free love, SF itself – which promised to reveal a better reality instead turned out to be part of the veil. Like America, Dick ...”

“... When it comes to the transmission of elite status from one generation to the next, Shakespeare or Plato no longer has the same cachet as economics or physics.Moral​ panics about ‘political correctness’ date back to the 1970s and early 1980s, when there was no mandated national curriculum, and conservatives could entertain paranoid fantasies of ‘loony ...”

“... argument of the sort Scarry offers to connect beauty and justice can possibly succeed. Plato was willing to say that only some people – the few philosophers among us – can discern real beauty, and that only they are just. Scarry draws no such distinctions; she takes beauty at face value, and doesn’t think that only superior minds or souls can ...”

“... Anthony Rudolf, a frequent recipient, offers a witty version of a Greek epigram once attributed to Plato. The original was addressed to a boy called Aster (i.e. ‘star’); Moore’s version is date-stamped 26 January 1970, the year the Beatles broke up: You gaze up in the night sky, Ringo, having chosen yourself to be one of the Starrs, And I only wish that ...”