“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for the truth? Surely they always knew that Westerns were a fiction, and loved them as a fiction. Plato knew that the hierarchy of gold, silver, bronze and iron souls recounted in the Republic was a fiction, and though he may not have wanted the people to know, surely they would have. They may still have accepted the myth, but as an allegorical rather than a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... through folios because she was forbidden to scamper on the grass. She wrestled with Aeschylus and Plato because it was out of the question that she should argue about politics with live men and women.’ That this echoes a letter from Wimpole Street does not make it the whole truth. Greek tragedy introduced Barrett to all manner of behaviour ...”

“... he invoked the memory of Eurycles, who features not only in Aristophanes’ Wasps but also in Plato’s Sophist, where he is described as one of those characters who live like ‘an enemy in their own house, carrying a voice within their bellies to contradict them wherever they go’. Proper historians may well look askance at such vast and tenuous ...”

“... krakens – and impossible objects: you find rings that make the wearer invisible as far back as Plato.What is​ fantasy for? You do not suddenly start needing philosophy on your eighteenth birthday: you have always needed it. Fantasy is philosophy’s more gorgeously painted cousin. You can’t just tell a child a blunt fact about the human heart and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... synaptic encounter by rendering it hormonal.In an epilogue to The Reckless Mind Lilla writes about Plato’s failed attempts to check the tyrannical impulses of the ruler of Syracuse, Dionysius, who had philosophical aspirations. Plato warned that the souls of weak-minded intellectuals are prey to the lure of eros, a ...”