'One reason for the conservatism is satisfaction. Protagoras had lived the prime of his life in the greatest age of Athenian political culture. He still seems to us to be a part of this glorious, relatively happy past; he stresses the fact that he is old enough to be the father of anyone else present. He is not gripped by the sense of urgency about moral problems that will soon characterize the writing of younger thinkers, for example Euripides, Thucydides, Aristophanes. The setting, with its allusions to the plague, its metaphors of disease, works to make this jolly conservatism seem anachronistic, inappropriate to the seriousness of the impending contemporary problems. We hear it in the way we might now hear a speech in praise of the Great Society made at the beginning of the Vietnam War – with our hindsight, and in the knowledge that failures of practical wisdom being made at that very time would erode the moral consensus the speaker was praising. We suspect that young Hippocrates, even without hindsight, will be less contented with things than his would-be mentor, inclined to look for stronger medicine. And if he is still content, the reader cannot be. It is no surprise that the dialogue compares Socrates' interview with these sophists to a living hero's visit to the shades of dead heroes in the underworld. It is a dead generation, lacking understanding of the moral crisis of its own time. Socrates compares himself to artful wily Odysseus, deviser of life-saving stratagems; compared with him, his rivals are without resource.'

Snow.

'I am not I, but the street, the lanterns, this and that event, nothing more.'

'… a work of diligent, lucid, and ultimately serene pedagogy…'

'… I still had to get out…'

Four decades of The Ex

A blizzard.

'… a sort of a submissive acquiescence to feelings of bafflement and confusion.'

'… Montaigne's scandalously demotic habit…'