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“... How much weight​ should we give to unpleasant revelations about the private lives of thinkers? It partly depends on what kind of thinker we’re talking about. When it was discovered a few years after his death in 1983 that Paul de Man had written for Nazi-controlled newspapers in Belgium, a debate began on whether this had any bearing on the deconstruction he propounded ...”

“... About a year after the Persians captured, sacked and burned the city of Miletus in 494 BCE, the Athenian playwright Phrynicus produced The Capture of Miletus, a tragedy about the colony’s harrowing fate. It was still early in the history of Athenian drama, and it may have been the audience’s reaction to Phrynicus’ play that led later tragedians to prefer mythological topics to contemporary ones ...”

“... Socrates in his cell, drinking hemlock. Cato at Utica, disembowelling himself not once but twice. And Seneca, with cuts in his arms and legs, waiting for the blood to trickle out of his shrivelled old veins. There is a reason these deaths have resonated with writers and thinkers throughout history: why, for example, Joseph Addison would write a drama in praise of Cato; why this drama would be admired by George Washington and imitated by Eustace Budgell; and why the latter’s 1737 suicide note would read: ‘What Cato did, and Addison approv’d,/Cannot be wrong ...”

“... with ‘infertility’ also haunts Dido, a woman who never has children, and who declares (in Shadi Bartsch’s translation):                       If at least I’d madea child with you, if a small Aeneas playedinside my home, who looked like you despite it all,I wouldn’t feel so lonely and betrayed.The triple meaning captures both the ...”

“... modern alterations to punish me. Then a new translation of the Aeneid appeared in the house, by Shadi Bartsch. It wasn’t quite as magical as Seamus Heaney’s translation of Book Six, but it was wonderfully clear and lively and more bloodthirsty than anything I’ve ever read: heads sliced in two, and the halves flopping sideways to become epaulettes ...”

“... way as to dissemble his possession of it.’ As others too have recently emphasised (in particular Shadi Bartsch in Actors in the Audience), the politics of the empire were founded on double-speak: no one said exactly what they meant, or meant exactly what they said. It is no surprise that, on his deathbed, Augustus is supposed to have quoted a line, in ...”