In the car department we would repair cars that were disabled and placed in bad order by a bunch of scalies taking the place of striking switchmen, engineers, Firemen, etc.

Kratochvil, Jedlicka, Safar, Kubes and Vasata, who always took an interest in politics, set up a soviet in the last wagon and uncoupled it from the rest of the train in the night.

The driver was a stalwart woman who sat at ease in the front seat and drove her car bare-headed. She left a cloud of dust and a trail of gasoline behind her.

Despite insistence that he was dealing with the literary man (‘homo Platonicus’ and ‘homo Aristophaneus’), and not the real Athenian aristocrat or farmer, [Kenneth] Dover tended to overlook the literary conventions: Pausanias in the ‘Symposium’ is not ‘homo Platonicus’ but simply one of the characters in the dialogue (who represents a fairly conventional aristocratic view, according to all the evidence); Aristophanes’ world is presented through the rather murky glass of comic distortion and requires interpretation.