“... his positing of Byzantium (‘a little before Justinian opened St Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato’) as a resolving point of contact between late classical, rational Europe and the expanding religions of the Middle East, puts him into our moment. Roy Foster deserves the highest praise for exposing the historical conditions that freed Yeats to become ...”

“... view of music as mannerism and good manners achieves its fullest expression. References to Plato, Diderot and Schiller lend the discussion an air of proper intellectual depth as Brendel sets out his understanding of musical jokes against various definitions of humour. Jokes are ‘breaches of order’ within ‘a framework of order’, laughter ...”

“... which is, as it happens, peculiarly expressive of Lowell, and which is identified, for readers of Plato, and again in modern times for readers of Derrida, with the ancient Greek word pharmakon, a drug. The word could mean both a poison and a cure. And this is what drugs were for Lowell. They braked his euphorias, but demeaned him, tamed him with ...”

“... it. As a consequence, the means of the spiritual struggle against libido do not consist, as with Plato, in turning our eyes upwards and memorising the reality we have previously known and forgotten. The spiritual struggle consists, on the contrary, in turning our eyes continuously downwards or inwards in order to decipher, among the movements of the ...”

“... and Ideas’. To describe the Novel in terms of its relationship with the newspaper is like making Plato define Love as the product of Poverty: what he actually called it was ‘the child of Poverty and Plenty’. A ‘functional’ definition of the origins of the Novel leaves out its fructifying or enriching element. It derives, not only from a new world of ...”

“... could move from Greek and Roman drama to Shakespeare. The English Moralists were to be headed by Plato, Aristotle, Paul and Augustine. What was being traced was a genuine ancestry of thought and form, with the linguistic connections assumed from the habits of the private schools. It is not so much this cultural connection that counts: it is the long gap, in ...”

“... and Knowledge, published in 1969, said the worry was old, she meant it went back at least to Plato. When Stathis Gourgouris says it is old, in a book called Does Literature Think? published earlier this year,1 he means the same thing: The idea that literature might harbour its own mode of knowledge is ancient, at least as old as the so-called quarrel ...”

“... Strauss the remedy to Hobbes’s defiled naturalism lay intact in the ancient wisdom set forth by Plato, for Oakeshott the incoherence of Hobbes’s naturalistic doctrine of will was only to be overcome in the modern reunion of reason and volition in Hegel and Bosanquet – even if their synthesis remained to be completed. In 1938 Strauss moved to the United ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”