“... back of a German – ‘Danny was imagining licking the back of his neck as he fucked him.’ St Augustine writes that sex makes us stupid, and that it make us simple. These are not obviously useful weaknesses for the novelist to cultivate in his characters. In The Spell, sex is too often a transparency, allowing the characters to speak only to their own ...”

“... poems and in her criticism and conversation. In spite of her NEB lapses, she knew her Origen and Augustine, her Cranmer and Laud, her Belloc, Chesterton and Ronald Knox. She could drive her friends to fury with casuistical arguments and ‘being impossible’. Olivia Manning, a gifted writer but one who never felt that justice had been properly done to her ...”

“... body etherealised, absolved of almost all fleshly qualities as they are understood on this earth. (Augustine even implies that since nothing will be hidden or shameful, celestial bodies will be transparent, and we will even enjoy ‘the sight of each others’ harmoniously arranged livers and intestines in paradise’.) Although some schoolmen were certain ...”

“... stewardship, which began early and continue to this day. From Aristotle and the Bible, and on to Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes and others, the point was made that rational human beings, the creatures with immortal souls, were the pinnacle of creation. But if animals were always and everywhere inferior, the dilemma persisted (at least for the interested ...”

“... Emily was kinder than ever. But the still flirty girl managed to meet and to marry the adroit Augustine Birrell, later Secretary of State for Ireland and an indefatigable turner-out of occasional light essays –‘Birrelling’, it came to be called. Emily, as usual, loved and welcomed, but Alfred was deeply suspicious. ‘Why do you want to force an ...”

“... declares that God ‘sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh’ (Romans 8:3), and when Augustine speaks of the Word assuming ‘the flesh of our sin but without sin’, we do not, we need not, suppose that they had the penis in mind. But Renaissance image-makers? Those among them who were rethinking the God-man’s physique had no choice but to ...”

“... the saintly resonances of such conduct. The first confessions were, after all, written by St Augustine. In this context, there is nothing paradoxical about the coupling of humility and authority. But what kind of self-abasement? The Christian model was traditionally corporeal: martyrdom, fasting, flagellation, reception of stigmata, sucking the festering ...”

“... these attempts at structure, religious crowds could still be unpredictable. In the fifth century, Augustine complained that an unexpectedly large and ‘rather restless’ horde had come to listen to him preach. Amid the commotion he had to read out a passage from the Gospels twice, ‘for my voice is such that it will only carry in a great silence.’ In the ...”

“... without any salaries, and I stayed in Arlington, Texas, with my struggling jewellery stores. As Augustine teaches us, the greatest part of virtue lies in the absence of opportunity for vice. Before long I went back to my dissertation and became a philosophy professor. There were no fledgling oil companies calling my ...”

“... and that all human beings would be raised at the same age as Christ, derives ultimately from St Augustine’s fifth-century speculations in City of God. Endlessly refined and elaborated by theologians and preachers, it had long constituted the Christian mainstream. By contrast, the quasi-Gnostic view that women would be raised as men had been explicitly ...”

“... letter to Rudolf Bultmann while struggling with Sein und Zeit, Heidegger listed Luther, along with Augustine and Kierkegaard, as ‘philosophically essential for a more radical understanding of Dasein’. The special place granted to German may also have been connected to the capacity of German to generate unusual nouns, very often compound ones: most of ...”

“... for a doctorate, and in the meantime gave him responsible teaching work. In 1509, by poring over Augustine, Luther ‘discovered the contrast between the Church Father and Aristotle’ – a remarkable discovery for anyone to stand in need of. In 1512 Martin became Doctor Luther, and Staupitz handed over to him the chair of Biblical Theology he had been ...”

“... of a tour guide, as in the chapter which starts: ‘On the way from Plato to Descartes stands Augustine.’ More important, there is a vagueness about the nature of the ‘inwardness’ whose history is being told. On one possible version, the story is a progressive shift of attention from a dominantly external view of human action to a much greater ...”

“... biologically different. Thomas de Cantimpré, the 13th-century anatomist, calling on St Augustine as his authority, presented the first ‘scientific’ statement of this phenomenon. Male Jews, he said, menstruated as a mark of pathological difference. The image of the Jewish male as female was introduced both to link the Jew with the corrupt nature ...”

“... London. The paper’s first lead review was of More Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, done by Augustine Birrell, a barrister, a Liberal MP, and the author of a volume of essays entitled Obiter Dicta. The first poem was by Harold Begbie. It was an anthem for Empire, and May succinctly describes it as ‘rather an absurd poem’. English studies, as an ...”