“... always classified as a passion, a state which one suffered, as one suffered hunger and lust. St Augustine called it concupiscentia oculorum, the ‘lust of the eyes’, a phrase that still resonated in the sermons of the early 18th century. St Bernard of Clairvaux, writing in the early 12th century, promoted it to the status of one of the seven deadly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is that for Adam and Eve to make their fatal choice they must have been corrupt already. St Augustine thought so, and the difficulty does not go away; Auden expresses it as a paradox –Since Adam, being free to chooseChose to imagine he was freeTo choose his own necessity ...– but Nuttall denies that one can explain sin as a simple consequence of ...”

“... of Johns and Marys, Thomases and Catherines. From the late 15th century, variety creeps in: an Augustine here, a Bartholomew there. Reformers looked to Hebrew names from the Old Testament – Samuel, Josiah and Abigail – to signify the elect. The Puritans went further still, putting modern celebrities to shame, though I doubt ...”

“... very well, but these advocates of ‘Management by Walking Around’ (MBWA) are topped by Norman Augustine, a former President of the American Institute of Aeuronautics and Astronautics, who has come up with 52, one for each week of the year. Augustine’s Laws uses its axioms to mock bureaucratic routine, state regulation ...”

“... and this inclined people to suppose that angels were made of a subtle kind of matter, as indeed Augustine had thought. When Milton in Paradise Lost said this about angels he was not considered shocking at all. But the change reflected back on those people who still believed in Middle Spirits (a few philosophers, and most of the countryside); it had now ...”

“... its plan, it could not have given, the kind of picture that Peter Brown has given, in his life of Augustine and other books about early Christianity, of what it was like to be someone at a certain date in Alexandria or in Carthage, wondering what to believe. It is not, in that sense, a work of history, as distinct from the history of philosophy, and it is no ...”

“... of God and of human ethical imperatives in the face of God’s presence or absence, who led to St Augustine and to Wittgenstein’s fiercely confessional self-examinations. But in essence, the young patrician ripened very slowly. Sexual ambiguities – Wittgenstein called them ‘sensualities’ – may have been inhibiting. The extreme wealth at Ludwig’s ...”

“... regard for scholarship that his very first act on becoming the 100th occupant of the throne of St Augustine should have been to abolish the custom by which diocesan bishops (however academically unqualified) were automatically awarded Lambeth Doctorates of Divinity on being raised to the bench. It was a forgivable, indeed commendable initiative in the new ...”

“... narrating of the self appears to be. It is not a modern phenomenon: Charles Taylor has fingered St Augustine as the first great apologist for personal inwardness. Nor is it, as Brooks sometimes implies, just a way of fashioning a subjective space within which we can be all the more cravenly subjected to power. If inwardness is a prison, it is also a set of ...”

“... it “impossible”.’ From the ancient Greeks to the author of Ecclesiastes, from Buddha and St Augustine to the Renaissance poets, death is not simply an ending but an internal undoing which, like the subversive motions of desire, undermines us from within. If mortality, like prohibition, is what makes our pleasures sweeter, it is also what punctures ...”

“... missionaries to the Anglo-Saxons. They came in a kind of pincer movement, from north and south: St Augustine began his mission in Kent in 603, while Christianity in the north began with the conversion of King Edwin of Northumbria twenty years later. Mercia, however, resisted for another generation, and the combination of Latin, literacy and Christianity was ...”

“... self, or everything but the self? Are absent-mindedness and present-mindedness the same things? As Augustine points out in the Confessions, memory is partly convincing yourself of what you knew all along; and the representation of consciousness, the speaking-aloud of consciousness, is a further redundant self-convincing. We are always forgetting things until ...”