“... On the Sublime is the most important work of ancient literary criticism between Aristotle and Augustine, served as tutor to the royal teenager. While the western empire, from Britain to the Balkans, remained threatened by invasion and was carved up among a series of competing emperors, Zenobia set about conquering the largest single kingdom the Greek ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and avoided his Great Books Discussion Group, which met each month ‘to chew over Plato, Augustine, Aquinas and other heavies’. But bibliotherapy seems to have sharpened the interest of other prisoners; San Quentin encouraged an implausible string of wannabe writers. Writing was a consolation; it was better than notching the walls, at least for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was positioned at a slight angle to reflect and refract the light.6 He was fond of quoting St Augustine – ‘beauty is the radiance of truth’ – and wanted to celebrate rather than disguise structural form. ‘Only skyscrapers under construction reveal the bold constructive thoughts,’ Mies wrote, ‘and then the impression of the high-reaching ...”

“... to renew God’s covenant with man. So the Jewish revelation, while superseded, is authentic. For Augustine, this was a reason not to slaughter the Jews. Although as enemies of God they had no right to exist, they bore witness to the truth of the prophetic texts. And their misery was living proof that God had replaced the old covenant with a new one. In this ...”

“... Why can​ the dead do such great things? Augustine’s rhetorical question, posed near the end of The City of God, launches Robert Bartlett’s massive, erudite compendium of saint lore. Bartlett never cites the bishop’s answer, which is that feats performed from beyond the grave vindicate faith in the resurrection ...”

“... famous Annunciation in the Venetian church of San Salvatore, which was painted for an altar of St Augustine. Because Gregory the Great’s defence of paintings was specifically concerned with stories, the idea that altarpieces were intended as a means of instruction can have been directly relevant only to relatively few of them, such as the series of four ...”

“... books’ course. It began with Plato’s Republic and continued with the Bible, before going on to Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Smith and so on. There was, it seemed to me, little sign of contemporary civilisation. Fully occupied with delivering twice-weekly lectures on Europe from 1870 to 1919 and a weekly graduate class on imperial ...”

“... teacher and student that blurred the limits between them. In On Instructing Beginners in Faith, St Augustine advised a burned-out Carthaginian deacon, Deogratias, to cultivate a feeling of compassion ‘so strong that, when our listeners are touched by us as we speak and we are touched by them as they learn, each of us comes to dwell in the other’.In the ...”