“... into which she was born abandoned. But Sartre is waiting in the Jardin du Luxembourg to talk about Plato – and a career as a writer and thinker is within reach.In the epilogue​ to Force of Circumstance, Beauvoir said that there had been ‘one undoubted success in my life: my relationship with Sartre’. She explained that they had only once, and only for ...”

“... tower, Where I may oft outwatch the Bear, With thrice great Hermes, or unsphere The spirit of Plato … Crusoe is a lonely Protestant visionary intellectual studying sacred texts by the light of the free individual conscience, and at one point he refers to ‘the great lamp of instruction, the Spirit of God’. There are other moments in Crusoe which ...”

“... matter who wrote what, but rather how a work is written and how it is read. The idea that because Plato and Aristotle are male and the products of a slave society they should be disqualified from receiving contemporary attention is as limited an idea as suggesting that only their work, because it was addressed to and about elites, should be read ...”

“... hierarchy, slavery, imperialism and patriarchy. I have taught many students how to read and love Plato while rejecting his aristocratic politics. I have argued in my classes that feminists should be suspicious of the idea of an innate gender identity, that mainstream pro-abortion politics needs to reckon with the vulnerability of the human foetus, that none ...”

“... makes its true way home. The spiritual world became identified with the intellectual (broadly in Plato, narrowly in Descartes) and Man (man) was seen as having the right intellectually to exploit the dirty world of matter to the utmost. Such a set of views and values leads to the spiritual degradation of the world, and one of its constant symptoms and ...”

“... Brighton, I had unfinished business with my mother; I told Gillian I needed time to catch up on Plato and Aristotle, but secretly I had applied for a place at teacher training college in Edinburgh and was planning to spend the rest of my grant there.Even now that I have, unlike Rose, attained the oldish age and physical invisibility she longed for, I still ...”

“... and valuable a part of Western civilisation.The earlier printed version had begun the list ‘From Plato to Lucretius’, had stuck with the Gnostics and Leibniz, but had had Thomas Aquinas instead of Thomas Hobbes, almost, as Arblaster woundingly put it, ‘as if it had to be Thomas somebody’. He went on, detailing other reworkings of the same ...”