“... and expressive powers of their work? There is indeed the extraordinary and unparalleled case of Aristotle, who has had an immense influence on the analytic tradition’s conception of what it is to get it right. But why should we even assume that these affectless treatises represent his own voice? To the extent that they do, what does the tone mean? The ...”

“... a good man to argue with over two, three or preferably a dozen drinks: A better man was Aristotle Pulling steadily at the bottle, wrote John Crowe Ransom comparing Aristotle with Plato, but he pulled no more steadily than Anthony Burgess. His wife Lynne knocked back two bottles of white wine and a pint of gin ...”

“... of the ivory towers. One can have doubts: Realist and Nominalist go back to Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle. And they are, we are reminded, still about today. Fifteenth and early 16th-century universities are examples of these divisions: are the ‘masters’ of these same universities always contributory causes of what came later? Their successors might be ...”

“... for he was to go on to write Plato and the Other Companions of Socrates and an unfinished study of Aristotle. No Englishman of his time contributed so much to the study either of Greek history or of Greek philosophy, and no one at all has contributed comparably to both. Born in 1794, a year before Carlyle, Grote was already in his forties when Queen Victoria ...”

“... expressible, they must be wrong. If I say, ‘How is it possible that by merely saying the word “Aristotle” I should be able to refer to Aristotle?’ I seem to have forgotten the beginning of the sentence by the time I get to the end – since the second occurrence of the name has to refer to ...”

“... which means ‘man is a wolf to a wolf.’ More important, he asserts, far too simply, that Aristotle and the Scholastics saw matter, not form, as ‘the principle of individuation’: that is, as what makes any particular thing its unique self. The form of a table, its having legs and a top, is universal, common to all tables; it is the timber from ...”

“... improves the way you think. Besides which, it enables you to read, for example, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Sappho, Sophocles, Euclid, Hippocrates, Archimedes, Lucretius, Seneca, Livy, Tacitus, Virgil, Ovid, not to mention Descartes: for all sorts of reasons, I wouldn’t want to live in a world in which no one understood them. And I don’t ...”

“... a phrase nicked from the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Except that, not having the Aristotle, he doesn’t mean it quite the way they do. The Open Left project is sponsored and overseen by Demos, one of those nifty think-tanks where besuited young people talk about the emerging shape of the 21st century, and Demos, too, has an interest in ...”

“... self-sufficient verbal artefacts. Riffaterre is at one with Brooks and Wimsatt – not to mention Aristotle and his formalist descendants – in believing that they must be so treated if poems are to retain any kind of enduring significance. He doesn’t, of course, deny that certain meanings may be lost, and others accrue in their place, by a process of ...”

“... very hard to define. Summers discovers in the Physiognomonica, attributed in the Renaissance to Aristotle, that a clouded brow ‘signifies self-will (audacia) as in the lion and the bull’, and then hints that this may be why Michelangelo portrayed David frowning. But surely an explanation would only be needed if David, who is waiting for the big ...”

“... philosophy of action, and some of the theories that have been proposed go back to Aquinas and Aristotle. We might expect a renaissance of this kind to produce rich and satisfying works. In fact, most of its participants have offered rather meagre fare. The deficiency, which is one that people feel immediately, is easier to identify than to correct. Either ...”

“... is, without pernicious seeming. The heroes of Fisher’s inquiry are Homer and Shakespeare, with Aristotle as philosophical spokesman. The repressive forces are the Stoics and the modern middle class, indeed modern life itself in its preference for displacement, therapy, compromise and the suppression or calculated restraint of self in the face of the claims ...”

“... have been purged but some still remain and a few new ones have crept in. For example, ‘Solider Aristotle’ from ‘Among School Children’ becomes ‘Soldier Aristotle’ in the commentary on ‘The Saint and the Hunchback’. The same error was there in the ’68 edition. Yeats gave the correct date (1703) for ...”

“... frustrated rescue, husband kills wife: high drama or melodrama. This version was already known to Aristotle; you could not, he says sourly in the Poetics, discussing recognition on stage, find a cruder device than the Theban birthmark. It was known also to a vase-painter who worked in South Italy about 340/320 BC; his stately amphora shows named characters in ...”

“... and a specific malady. It was the well of fear, depression, despair and madness, but also – as Aristotle had formulated and Renaissance Neoplatonism echoed – the stuff of genius. In retiring to his tower, Montaigne knew his fate hung in the balance. Characteristically, when in Ferrara he visited Tasso, to see what happened when a genius indulged his ...”