“... exclude women from public speech but also to parade that exclusion. In the early fourth century BC Aristophanes devoted a whole comedy to the ‘hilarious’ fantasy that women might take over running the state. Part of the joke was that women couldn’t speak properly in public – or rather, they couldn’t adapt their private speech (which in this case was ...”

“... with more classical insecurities, 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were considered low-class. The most famous account of intentionality in Greek naming comes from Aristophanes’ Clouds; Strepsiades explains how he wanted to call his son Pheidonides (‘Of the Line of Thrift’) but his posh wife wanted a Hippos-name to evoke upper-class horsemanship and chariots. So they ended up with Pheidippides. That name (‘Of the ...”

“... attended by all the philosophers’ – and ‘Empusa’, a chthonic she-monster mentioned by Aristophanes in The Frogs, which is acted out by one of Tokarczuk’s consumptives during a therapeutic picnic on a hill. The precise form of the Empusa is never clear, but they speak as a collective throughout the novel, and make themselves heard from the very ...”

“... extrapolate from Grene’s suggestion, one might compare Bellow’s spoof of psychoanalysis to Aristophanes’ spoof of philosophy in The Clouds, both plays being simultaneously knockabout and deadly serious.’ Yes, one might, but why? Since one play is a classic, the other a seldom revived clunker, this compare and contrast exercise can only spin its ...”

“... his sense of Swift as one of his own great literary masters, along with (and perhaps surpassing) Aristophanes, Lucian, Rabelais and Cervantes, was strong. In return, Swift is said to have admired Fielding’s wit and to have confessed that one of the only two occasions in his life when he remembered having laughed was ‘at the circumstance of Tom Thumb’s ...”

“... art and seven or eight languages and literatures, to know the Bible and the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes (and Victorian scholarship on them) by heart, to be intimately familiar – for a start – with Keats and Shelley and Donne and Milton and Homer and Anacreon and Alciphron and Herodotus and Thucydides and Horace and Shakespeare and Wanley and ...”

“... later to receive from the Royal Society of Literature, put it more succinctly, quoting (I think) Aristophanes: ‘Don’t make your house in my mind.’ Though with Larkin it was ‘Don’t make your house in my house either,’ his constant fear being that he will be moved in on, first by his mother and then, when she’s safely in a home, some other ...”

“... of a careerist feminism, it had left many university departments in conditions to which only an Aristophanes or Molière could do justice. Multiculturalism, as often as not combined with what should be its opposite, American juridification of every issue, led inevitably to a slack relativism. In the desert of political ideas under another astute but ...”